Selected Essays | Emily Ogden on Elizabeth Hardwick

On this episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach talk to writer and literary critic Emily Ogden about Elizabeth Hardwick’s "Living in Italy: Reflections on Bernard Berenson," first published in Partisan Review in 1960.

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Transcript

 Jessica Swoboda  00:05

Hey everyone, welcome to Selected Essays, a podcast series from The Point magazine about essays you should read but probably haven't. Each episode, we'll be talking with writers about an essay that's influenced one of their own. My name is Jess Swoboda, and I'm here with my co-host, Zach Fine.

Zach Fine  00:23

This week, we spoke with Emily Ogden about Elizabeth Hardwick's essay "Living in Italy: Reflections on Bernard Berenson," which was first published in Partisan Review in 1960. We also talked to Emily about her essay from Issue 29 of The Point published last year titled "Elizabeth Hardwick's 'I'". Emily is the author of On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays and Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism. She's Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. 

Jessica Swoboda  00:52

We hope you'llb enjoy this episode and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selected essays at the pointmag.com. We'd love to hear from you. And also be sure to subscribe to The Point, the magazine that brings you content like this podcast. You can find a 50% off discount code exclusive to listeners in the Episode Notes. 

Zach Fine  01:26

Hey, Emily, thank you so much for joining us. 

Emily Ogden  01:29

It's my pleasure. 

Zach Fine  01:30

Before we begin, can you tell us why you chose this essay by Hardwick out of all of her work?

Emily Ogden  01:35

Yeah. So this essay, which is called "Living in Italy: Reflections on Bernard Berenson," is a portrait which is one of the things that Hardwick excelled at. She was. She was born in 1916 in Lexington, Kentucky, and then came to New York, where she became kind of the consummate New Yorker. In spite of not being from there, she wrote for the Partisan Review, and she wrote, then later for the New York Review of Books, and what she did in the pages of those magazines that was so wonderful was to write these short biographical sketches, often of writers, which combined a sense of who they were as people with gossip and with a sense of their style. And I think she was really preoccupied with uniting those three things, understanding how tiny observations about even one's physical body could connect to style and thought. And this, this essay about Bernard Berenson, which is written in part on the basis of acquaintance, since the gossip she knew Berenson when she and her husband, poet Robert Lowell, were in Italy, is a really good example of what she loved in portraiture, which is people who did not quite fit together. You couldn't make them into a recognizable type. They had little features that seemed to clash. And she she adored that she loved about Hart Crane, for example, that he was a homosexual, as she called him, with a repressive family who committed suicide, and yet somehow he seemed to have been happy. And so she just loved those types of mysteries. And this Berenson essay begins with her thinking of Berenson as that type of mystery, a person she couldn't quite get to cohere,

Zach Fine  03:15

You mentioned Lowell and their time in Italy, and I'm wondering if there's anything else about Hardwick's life we should know before turning to the first passage.

Emily Ogden  03:24

I think what I've said is probably enough. I mean, she, you know, you can think of her as somebody who we remember, maybe most obviously, as the writer of Sleepless Nights, which was kind of autofiction, maybe before its time, or right at the beginning of its time. But the bulk of her writing life was reviewing, often for the Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books and and this is, this is that type of essay, although it's not a review, it's a memorial written after Berenson died for the Partisan Review. And so it shows her in the guise that she most frequently occupied, which was that of magazine writer.

Zach Fine  04:02

Can you read the opening of the essay for us? 

Emily Ogden  04:05

Sure. I'd be happy to. "In the rather meek official narration of the life of Mrs Jack Gardner, I came across an arresting photograph of Bernard Berenson as a young man a student at Harvard. Here among the illustrations relating to the subject of biography, Mr and Mrs Gardner with Mr and Mrs Zorn in Venice, the Gothic room at the Gardner Museum, etc, among the details of ancestry, the accounts of endless journeys and evening parties, of purchases and decisions, courageous endurance And interesting self indulgence, the passionate young face of Berenson gazed out serenely a dreaming animal caught in the dense jungle growth of a rich, lively woman's caprice and accomplishment. This early photograph is a profile as fine and pleasing as young girls the hair worn long, curls slightly falling into layers of waves. There is a perfect young man's nose, a pure, musing brown, lashed eye, fortunate, long, strong bones of chin and jaw. The collar of the young man's jacket is braided with silk, and he looks like an Italian prodigy of the violin, romantically, ideally seen, finally designed a gifted soul already suitable to court circles. We spent the winter of 1950 in Florence, and we used to go out to see Berenson, as so many had gone before and would go afterward. This unusual man was marvelously vivacious and in more than one respect, actually inspiring, and yet I would always leave him somewhat troubled, ungratefully, adding and subtracting, unable to come to a decision about him or his life. He was not what I had expected, but I despaired of having an original, fresh or even an honest opinion of him. He was too old. Had been viewed and consulted far too much. You had a belated feeling you were seeing the matinee of a play that had been running for eight decades." And I love that, that ending problem that she sets for herself, because I think it was in many ways, the central problem of her intellectual life. How could you come to an understanding of a person that that incorporated all of his funny angles and his inconsequent and incoherent parts? And and I love to that that metaphor which is so like her and so fresh of like a matinee that's been running for decades. And you you're sort of coming with all the tourists from from, you know, dare one say, Lexington, Kentucky, to New York, and seeing the play, you know, Cats in the year 1997 or something. And so she, um, she sees herself seeing him this way, and she's trying to undo that, or fix that. And that's why she had gone back to the youthful portrait. Berenson was old when she knew him. He was in his late 80s and 90s. He died when he was 94 and so this is about trying to understand an old, polished man, a man who's been practicing at presenting himself for 75 to 80 years, you know, and it's a task that she relishes but also finds really challenging.

Jessica Swoboda  07:24

Yeah, I find the form of this essay really interesting. The movement seems to be we get the situation so her looking at this photograph, reflecting on this photograph, then we get her own personal encounter with Berenson. Then the kind of biographical part, then the cultural reflection, then kind of the judgment-analysis section, is there something noteworthy to the way Hardwick has approached her subject and crafted this portraiture?

Emily Ogden  07:49

Yeah, you know, that's an interesting question. I would describe it as kind of circling around and trying to get a better angle. You know, she she starts at a very oblique and weird angle, you know, one that then she only subsequently explains. So if you're trying to understand Bernard Berenson in the 1950s you don't look for a picture of him when he was 20 years old with Isabella in the collection of Isabella Stewart Gardner's effects, which, which is why she wants to start that way. You know, she wants to see him before he had yet been known. And Isabella Stewart Gardner, as people probably know, was a great art collector who then subsequently gave her home to become a public museum that you can now see the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and that turns out, sort of slyly, then to be folded back in to Berenson's own biography, and what she turns out to be saying is that Berenson is like Isabella Stewart Gardner, because his home, the Villa I Tatti, became the Harvard Institute for Italian Renaissance studies when he died. And as she points out, he um, he spent his whole life economizing so he'd have enough money to give to endow the Villa I Tatti and Harvard would take it. So it turns out that this isn't as oblique as it looks, but it's it's supposed to be, or it starts out as being oblique, and then she approaches from the angle of gossip. And you know, you're literally approaching the house she and Lowell, living, you know, in the city, and sending people out to Berenson. And she keeps sort of looking at him from little angles. And I think part of what that does for her, formally, is that it allows her to put in the kinds of things that she actually thinks matters, you know, like an image of him on the arm of the dancer Catherine Dunham, like a little known king. You know, she thinks it matters that he's very small, that to Hardwick is an important fact about Berenson, though it isn't you know a fact about his aesthetics or his his career as a as a potentially dubious matchmaker between buyers and sellers of the works of the Italian Renaissance. So by approaching it in this sort of wary circling way, she came, she can put in whatever she wants, in a way. And that's that's how her portraits tend to work, with those little glimpses that surprise you and and make give you the sense that you have of when you're meeting a real person and not everything adds up. It kind of reminds me of the fact that, like painters, if they want to make a portrait look like it's looking at you the eyes, the two eyes, have to look in different directions, and that's similar to Hardwick's technique. She she'll have anecdotes looking in different directions, and it creates the effect of verisimilitude of humanness. 

Zach Fine  10:32

I love the way that you're talking about, the kind of seeing him at angles and circling around. I was, I was looking for other contemporary portraits of Berenson that were written around the time that Hardwick wrote this. And I found something in the Atlantic written by Francis Henry Taylor, who was at the Met. I think he was the director of the Met for a period of years. And he, the way he introduces Bernard Berenson in the first paragraph of the essay, is this just kind of bombastic, authoritative portrait from on high, or, you know, he, you know, summarizes all of his accomplishments. He gives you a sense of the great man and the Hardwick by comparison, it's just such a different you get a sense of just, you know, how she would approach a person of this kind of eminence, but through these kind of subtle angles, as you're saying, um, encircling him. So I kind of, I love that, that comparison.

Emily Ogden  11:20

Yeah, that's a really good idea to look at other portraits, because you can kind of see those other portraits, like brooding over what she's saying. And this is part of what makes her such a good essayist. She She knows what other people have said, and she, you know, she was, she was probably talking to those people at parties. You know, she's very well connected, but she finds her own angle, and she doesn't necessarily directly rebut. She sort of just layers on top. And so one of the ways that she does that is that knowing that Berenson would be seen as the ultimate snob, because what he did was to he was, he was an art historian, and he also made a lot of money as a broker, getting giving people would send him their Italian Renaissance drawings and things, and he would look at them and pronounce this or that to be by such and such an important painter. And then he would put them in touch with the rich person who had money to buy it, and he would get some sort of kickback. And so people thought he was a snob, and they thought that he was perhaps a crook. And she addresses both of those, those facts about him, not by rebutting them, but by making them strange. So for example, she says it's just one little sentence that I'll read about introducing people to Berenson, and she and Lowell would apparently write letters of introduction to Berenson, a dying form by this point, but apparently still in the 1950s alive, that you would write a letter of introduction saying, you know, I'm sending you my friend, please invite them in. But she says, "no one was easier to see than Berenson." And then she says, "when we mailed a letter of introduction to him, he accepted it as a bizarre formality, because, of course, he was he who saw everyone was willing and happy to see yet another." In other words, you could effectively go present yourself at the gates of Villa I Tatti and Berenson would see you. And she puzzles over why he would do this, and she finally decides he was just he was really scared of missing something. He didn't want the person who had come to turn out to be the one person he he would have liked to see or gotten something from, and that just doesn't really comport with the sense of him as a tastemaker. But it also tells us that maybe our idea of what a tastemaker is is kind of a caricature that we should throw away, and that's typical of her portraits to to put some kind of caricature type on display and to use it, but then to to make it strange in some way.

Jessica Swoboda  13:48

I want to return to a line from the second paragraph that you read that was one of my favorites in this essay. And it was "he was not what I expected, but I despaired of having an original, fresh, or even an honest opinion about him, who's too old, had been viewed and consulted far too much. You had a belated feeling you were seeing the matinee of a play that had been running for eight decades." And so I love this for various reasons. The first is that it suggests she doesn't have an agenda or a particular view that she's trying to impose on this portrait. Rather, she's letting what she sees direct her in the telling. And then the second I love it because I think it's funny. And then the third thing is I love it because it captures why we might write portraitures as well. And so I'm wondering if you can talk a bit about what this essay and what Hardwick, as this essayist, is saying about the role of portraitures, the importance of them as an essay form? 

Emily Ogden  14:41

Yeah, that's a really good question, and one that I've thought a lot about, and I've never come to an answer that I find completely satisfactory but, but basically I think that she thinks, and it's sort of a scandal to say something like this now, long, long after the death of the author, but I think that she thinks that art issues from life, you know, and she thinks that one needs to have a complex and and a nuanced and even a kind of artistic portrait of the life in order to understand the art. And if you look at her essays over the course of her career, this is a surprisingly consistent obsession. One of the very first essays in Hardwick's career, she says that our sense of artists comes most clearly from gossipy kinds of writing about them. So this is the essay "Memoirs, Conversations and Diaries." And she thinks that instead of like chastising people who knew writers well for writing about them and writing about their personal lives, this is what we should be looking for. And on the other hand, she is always panning academic biographies that exercise no discernment whatsoever among the details and and I think it's because she wants to let us see art as a kind of distillation of experience. And she thinks it matters which experience it was, you know, it's, it's shouldn't really be a controversial point, although it's become one that we don't say very often, because we think of texts rather than works. And, you know, we don't go back into the biography, except with great trepidation. But she didn't, she didn't feel that way. You know, she thought those two things were closely connected, and it may be relevant to mention to that her husband of decades and and surely one of her closest intellectual interlocutors, Robert Lowell, was the confessional poet, so it was part of a central conversation of her life to think about the making of life into art and and I think in her own reviewing and writing, she was kind of going back into the lives of the writers that she admired or didn't admire, and writing confessions on their behalf. I think that's what she wanted her essays to look like. 

Zach Fine  17:11

Wow, I've never thought about that in her book's work, but writing confessions on behalf of the writers, I actually, I really like that as a way of thinking about them. I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit about physical description, because in a portrait, we think about how we describe somebody's appearance, and maybe you have your own favorite lines from the essay, but one that stood out to me is when she talks about him looking like a jockey. So she says "in Berenson's beauty, there was the refinement, the discipline, the masculinity of a little jockey and some of that profession's mixture of a fiercely driving temperament with the capacity for enjoying a judicious repose. He understood that the proud small person, believing in art and comfort, must have singular powers and unrelenting watchfulness." Now the first time I read this is often with Hardwick's work, you kind of drive by the sentence, and you might kind of miss the meaning of it a little bit. And then I read it again, and I'm like, Oh, she's, she's saying he's a short guy. He's a short and I was like, maybe, actually, maybe I've missed that in time. Maybe he's not short. But like, I was trying to figure out, I think, you know, she's saying, obviously, so much more than that. But I was wondering if she was kind of what she was kind of scratching at here about, you know, in terms of physical appearance, or where she was actually trying to avoid saying anything about his physical appearance, and was just talking about some kind of latent disposition that is, that of a jockey. So I was wondering, do you think she's describing appearance, or is it more of a kind of essence that she's after, usually in her portraits?

Emily Ogden  18:36

I mean, if she was trying to avoid describing appearance, she did a terrible job, because she talks in the first paragraph about him being having a face as fine and pleasing as young girls. And then he's a jockey, and he's a sort of a foreign prince, a character in a fairy tale, which arguably suggests smallness. And then he's a gnome King, and that's only really it's really important to her that he's short, and I don't think that's that's trivial to her, and I don't think it's accidental that she talks about him physically so much. I think that she wants us to understand that he had a certain task in carrying himself in his social life that bleeds over into or helps us to understand the achievement of the criticism, which is that, you know, he was, he was, he was in danger of becoming, she thinks, feminized, or your store, you know, being overlooked, and he made his size instead something that could be respected or could be seen as a sign, if not of power, at least of discipline, as in the phrase that you read. And I think that she thought that those kinds of achievements were on a continuum with the achievements of style in writing. And you know, it's, it's not atypical for her to talk about things that we would think of as part of private life, that that essay that I referenced earlier, "Memoirs, Conversations and Diaries", is, is in some ways, championing these little details of personal style as being revealing of or helping us to understand like written style. And so for whatever reason, she thought that that the key, the revealing detail to Berenson's written style was that he was tiny and graceful. Yeah, you know, it's not just any short guy, you know, he's like a he's a small, refined short guy who's capable of walking next to a dancer. This is the gnome Kim line where she says that she, she says, a deeper truth of his nature was caught in odd moments. And that, by the way, is sort of the Hardwick poetics. A deeper truth of his nature was caught in odd moments. That's what she thinks of everybody she writes about. And I think it's true. She does do this. She does do this successfully. I remember seeing him, ancient, Regal, stepping along nimbly like a little gnome King on the arm of the dancer Catherine Dunham. And that's her Berenson. She also says, In addition, this is physical she says this very next line, the great age Berenson achieved did not strike one as an accident. And how amazingly true that is. I mean, there are certain people of whom that's so that it seems as though they were destined to endure. And it seems to be of a piece with her sense of his the compactness and grace and discipline of his physical economy, which is part of how she sees him as a critic.

Zach Fine  21:42

One thing I was curious about was about the audience for this essay. We know that it was published in Partisan Review in 1960 and you talked a little bit about Lowell. And in the essay, the pronoun that she uses is "we," without ever mentioning Lowell. You know, it's the first person plural, and she's saying we went there and we saw Berenson. And I'm wondering, for readers of this essay at this point, what is the kind of shadow presence of Lowell in the essay? Is he? Do you think the reader immediately knows that it's Lowell? Does she assume the reader knows it Lowell? Or is that kind of irrelevant to the framing? Just trying to imagine what it would be like to encounter this as a subscriber to Partisan Review in 1960 and kind of what that, that we does.

Emily Ogden  22:24

Yeah, I mean, I think of it as being a little bit like the "we" of "Talk of the Town" in the New Yorker now. I think this is this "We" of "Talk of the Town" is a relic of this moment. Maybe it's disappearing a little bit, but it's a relic of a moment when a New York literary publication is going to address an in crowd who know exactly who the "we" is, and who know the sexual history of the "we," and an out crowd, maybe in the provinces where she came from, that doesn't for whom it functions as a royal "we," and it's it's not uncommon in the talk of the town for the "we" to function still a little bit that way. Sometimes in the in the hands of certain writers, you get a glimpse of their own autobiography, and other times, it functions purely as the "we" of the correspondent. So I think it's I think it's both. There are some people, of course, who know with whom she was in Italy, and she's not trying to hide that. And then there are others who don't, but she's not going to leave them disoriented, you know, that you don't really need to know with whom she was in Italy to get a sense of it, but you might get a sort of a charge out of being one of the ones who know, and that is often a visible division of audience in not just her writing, but in the writing, in the Partisan Review, the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker. And I think in some ways, you know the significance that it has for her, beyond that sort of formal affordance that's shared among many writers for these publications, the significance that it has for her is that she does value the the person proximate to the writer and the kind of information that they have. And so with the "we knew him in Italy," she's not just name dropping, you know, she's signaling that she has the kind of knowledge of firsthand social experience that mattered to her in biographical writing. She referred very often in her career to Maxim Gorky's reminiscences of Tolstoy, which for her was a kind of high watermark of biography. And it was because Gorky knew Tolstoy, and he walked with him, and then wrote poetically about that experience, and that was what she thought this type of portraiture should look like. And so she's signaling with that we knew him in Italy, that she's qualified to do that with Berenson. And it seems like probably in 1960 it's a it's probably a tribute to his to Berenson after his death, because he died in October of 1959 and so also, you know, people get a little more personal around deaths, that you tend to talk a little bit more whether you knew the person or not.

Jessica Swoboda  25:07

Now seems like a good time to turn to the passage you selected, Emily. Can we turn to that, and can I ask you to read it out loud for us?

Emily Ogden  25:14

Sure. So this passage is about Berenson's taste, and so in one sense, it could be said to be the heart of the essay, because Berenson's taste is what made him famous. And she's trying to describe that taste, which is a difficult thing to describe. "A hardening and narrowing repetition of positions taken long ago, obstinate rejections, disguised pain and fear of obsolescence in Italy, the tremendousness of the past reinforces the spirit in its old assumptions. Nothing new seems to be required. It was part of Berenson's idyllic removal that he couldn't like much of the art of his own time. The gods will not grant every gift he set himself against violence, fragmentation, improvisation, primitivism. He couldn't accept Picasso, Stravinsky, TS Eliot, Kafka. He was apprehensive about these productions, irked by the broken forms. He liked Homer, Goethe and Proust, but Faulkner disposed him to fretfulness. He looked upon so many contemporary things with painful distaste and something like hurt feelings. He seemed to see his own essence threatened with devastation for him, the agile will, the effort to maintain security and preserve courage, had been everything, hesitation, nihilism, abstraction appalled this pulsing ego that had sought to define In his work and personal existence, a compact, ennobling classical example. It was odd that in the lighter arts and living personalities, he was extremely in the know, open to feeling, to humor, to affection to wild originality." I think we see there again the little jockey or the gnome king, but in the form of taste. So he's he rejects modernism, in effect, broken forms, fragmentation, because it threatens this coherence, this, this some, this sort of inward drawing force of his compact nature. And for her, that's his physical body and his his mind as well. And so I chose this passage partly because of that, because of it being a description of taste, but also just because of the really funny line about his feelings being hurt by modernism. You know, that's just so lovely and so sort of, in some ways, such a good reading of modernism, which surely aimed to hurt feelings of someone like Berenson. So I love the way that she captures that and then, and then draws it back to this physical portrait that she's been sprinkling throughout the essay, so that by the time you get here, you're you're prepared to see what this, that this, this rejection of Picasso was personal to him. 

Jessica Swoboda  27:59

Yeah, there's this interesting movement in this passage, between the kind of universal and the particular. The first few sentences to the initial reader might not seem to be attached to Berenson, but of course, we know that they are. And so I'm wondering if you could speak a bit about this movement between the universal and the particular throughout this portraiture in its entirety and kind of how is one informing the other and vice versa?

Emily Ogden  28:22

Yeah, I think that it's a way of trying to represent upfront the difficulty of describing taste, like, how do you or style, for that matter, because those are sort of two sides of the same coin. You know, stylist appeals to taste, taste perceived style, and and all that we're perceiving or putting out is a kind of a of a set of qualities. So whatever it is that's a taste or is a style, it never is the topics or the concrete forms. It's a kind of way in which they're perceived or presented. And so she starts with the list of qualities before she goes on to any kind of concrete noun, a hardening and a narrowing, repetition of positions taken long ago, obstinate rejections. And then the same when she comes to modernism, which she defines in terms of qualities, again, violence, fragmentation, improvisation, primitivism. And what she manages to do, I think, is show that for Berenson, the two conflicts, one between the courtliness and the compression of his tastes on the one hand and fragmentation and violence on the other hand, and then also the individual confrontation that he had with these works, where Faulkner hurt his feelings. These are one in the same because for him, you know, this was, this was all part of one life. He was presenting his body and presenting his tastes and receiving works of art and receiving people into his house, all in one single life. And he applied these same sort of qualitative standards to each or he could be discerned doing that at least at certain revealing moments. So she wants us to see how she sees kind of, first the qualities and then the way they cohere in glimpses and moments of social information and gossip, in short. She wanted to see and wanted us to see how those those were different modalities of the same struggle on Berenson's part.

Zach Fine  30:31

The word "style" has come up a few times, and because we have this passage in front of us, and because Hardwick is so famous for being a stylist, I'm wondering if we can look a little more closely at its kind of formal qualities, and if there's any way that you could kind of read it for us as a symptom of or not a symptom, but as an example of Hardwick's style. What about it is specifically Hardwickian, or is it kind of a hallmark of her style?

Emily Ogden  30:58

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, it's difficult to describe her style. And so I'll do the best I can. I think there's some aspects of this passage that are that are really good examples. One is the sentence "The gods will not grant every gift" and its relation to the other sentences. So before that sentence, which is very short and declarative and kind of epigrammatic, ready to be carried out and inscribed on something or repeated to other people. Around it are longer sentences that are quite a bit more expository. I"t was part of Berenson's idyllic removal that he couldn't like much of the art of his own time. He set himself against violence, fragmentation, improvisation, primitivism." Between those informative, discursive sentences comes "the gods will not grant every gift," and that's pretty typical of her. She has, she has these certain gems, and she knows that they're the gems of the paragraph. But she, you know, she doesn't overstud a paragraph with these things. There's only a few in there at a time, in spite of the fact that she seems to have been endlessly productive of them. I mean, you can find epigrams everywhere in her book's word. So it seems to have been a deliberate choice not to get too fancy with these types of sentences. I mean, I think probably she could have put in more, but she doesn't. She limits it, and she around them are these much less fussy sentences that don't scan. You know, they're not, they're not poetic. And I think that alternation, too, between the epigrammatic sentence and the more expository sentence, it's also, there's also a bit of an oscillation of vantage point. So when she's doing the the expository sentences, she's a journalist, and when she's saying, "The gods will not grant an every gift," she's like the narrator of the Victorian novel, you know, and she, that is to say, an omniscient narrator with a kind of infallible moral compass. And so she oscillates between those two things. And of course, in the in the middle of the 20th century, you can't be a Victorian novelist with a with an infallible moral compass. No one accepts that kind of thing anymore. And she writes about this fact, by the way. I mean, she, she has, she writes about about the fact that the novel can no longer look like that, but what is still possible is to slip it in every now and then in your expository prose. And so that's what she does. And she writes at various points that she loves the prose of poets, she tells Daryl Pinckney, in an essay for the or an interview for the Paris Review, that the prose of poets is one of her passions. And I think she, in some ways, writes like a poet, in that she has these sort of brief glimpses that don't have their full apparatus around them, but have just enough of this expository prose that you can accept an oracular utterance from her, and then she gives it to you. So that's, I guess that's one thing I would say. The other thing I would say about the style of this paragraph is, you don't get too much scene setting. You just get the crucial moment, which is that Faulkner hurt his feelings. You know, you don't know when or what he said or where they were. You know, you never see the scene where Hardwick is standing in Villa I Tatti, listening to Lowell, you know, talking and talking and and then she notices that Berenson blanches visibly when, when Faulkner is mentioned. She just tells you. And that too is typical of her, this kind of, like, almost fabulous quality of telling you things she couldn't possibly know, as though there were no problem about knowing them, and without ever giving you the evidence you know for the scene setting, again, interspersed with more journalistic kinds of evidence giving so that you're lulled into a false sense of security about what sort of essay is is happening.

Jessica Swoboda  35:01

I love how this essay ends with, "At the end, the pope sent his blessing," kind of an amazing concluding line, and it's different than a lot of the other sentences we read throughout this. But how are we meant to interpret this final statement on its own, but also as the concluding sentence of a portrait on Berenson?

Emily Ogden  35:24

Well, it suggests the blessing of, you know, the head of one city state, to the head of another, Villa I Tatti is in the previous sentence, all those hundreds upon hundreds of guests of the past. This is guest of Villa I Tatti, his home. "The surly writers and old ladies from Boston, the Dons, the pansies, the actresses, the historians won't be coming back to gossip in a whisper in the halls about how fortunes were made to sneak into Florence, to get drunk at the Excelsior and to see the unique Berenson leading his curious life. At the end, the pope sent his blessing." Well, who's like the Pope in this little scene, it's clearly Berenson, because everyone's coming to play court to him at his semi independent, you know, landhold and and so I think it's, it's, in some ways, about saying that he was a pope of sorts, you know, he was, he was holding court over visitors. He had a kind of quasi independence there, not, of course, from nation states, but from universities. He never held a university post. He didn't have a doctorate and and so I think part of the work that that does is to say that, you know, the pope recognized likeness in Berenson to himself. That surely is not what the Pope meant, but it seems to be what Hardwick means. And as a matter of style, it's similar to what I was just describing, the long, very prosy sentence, and then the the impact of this very short ending "at the end of Pope sent his blessing."

Jessica Swoboda  37:06

So you selected to pair your review essay entitled "Elizabeth Hardwick's 'I'" with "Living in Italy: Reflections on Bernard Berenson." Now the reason for this pair might be obvious. We have an essay by Elizabeth Hardwick paired with an essay about Elizabeth Hardwick's writing, but I'm wondering if you can tell us if there are other resonances that might not be immediately apparent between yours and Hardwick's.

Emily Ogden  37:28

Yeah, the essay that I wrote about Hardwick for The Point was about her as a portraitist, on the occasion of her being the subject of an academic biography and a memoir by Cathy Curtis and her student, Darryl Pinckney, respectively. And these were two genres that she wanted to tack between as a portraitist. She was especially hard on academic writing because she thought that no discernment was being exercised about what went in and what stayed out. But she was often hard on memoir and reminiscence as well, because she didn't always think that it achieved the high watermark of Gorky on Tolstoy being poetic, giving the right amount of gossip and not too much. And I think in some ways, implicitly, she was working out her own, not just style, but her own kind of poetics as a portraitist and biographer, as she reviewed items from those genres, because, as I say, that's something that she frequently did, and I wanted to choose a portrait that I thought was one of her greatest successes. And I think this, this is one of her greatest successes. It's, I don't know that it's a particularly famous essay, but it's, it's a very, very good example of Hardwick's gifts as a portraitist. And it's also one where she's reflecting on the problem of portraiture, which she often did that being the problem of things not adding up, and how do you make them add up? And one where she occupies the position of memoirist as well, in that she knew Berenson personally. So I wanted to talk about it for that reason. She she's sort of one time with her very late biography of Herman Melville, managed to do this sort of thing at book length. But really it was in magazine essays that she excelled at it the most, because the portrait is essentially not a long thing. You know, it has to be read in a single sitting brevity as part of the form. So I think if we want to see her at her best in this genre, that she that meant so much to her. It's it's actually her magazine writing, her ephemeral, her ephemeral writing where we see that the most easily. 

Zach Fine  39:50

In the past handful of years, I've noticed that there's been a huge resurgence of interest in Hardwick. And maybe this is just a shortsightedness on my own part, but it seems like since the collected essays came out in 2017 from NYRB Press, that I've noticed so many writers and critics turning to her work and in some cases, absorbing her style in different ways. And I'm curious why you think her work appeals so much now, and not that she wasn't well known in her life, she was very distinguished, and sat on many panels and in many committees and won awards. But I'm wondering, what about her work resonates particularly with with writers and critics today?

Emily Ogden  40:29

Yeah it's a good question. One thing that's clearly happening, and maybe it's the largest thing that's happening, is that the right amount of time has passed for an apparatus to get going around her work. So I think you're right to date this to the collected essays. The nyrb has also published a new edition of sleepless nights and her collected stories. They've published the uncollected essays edited by Alex andresa, is also really good. And then the Cathy Curtis biography and the and the memoir by Pinkney. So especially the biography and the memoir, generated a lot of reviewing, including in publications that Hardwick wrote for, and so part of it is just the way that editing and biography writing work and how long it takes after a death for those things to happen. All of that said what might appeal about her now, I mean, I can say what appeals to me about her now, which is that she is not writing personal essays in a confessional sense. In fact, she wrote a confessional book called Smiling Through, but she abandoned it. And so she she seems to have sort of rejected that mode of the first person, and yet her essays are strongly first personal. They very often have an identifiable vantage point. She thinks that the kind of information that we get from as I keep saying, gossip and social life, is important, and she sometimes implicates herself too when she writes about civil rights protests that she's part of, she implicates herself as a white participant, for example. And I think that that maybe at this moment, some of us, myself included, are trying to find ways of writing from something other than an impersonal viewpoint, a view from nowhere, and also something other than a first person confessional or sort of trauma processing type essay viewpoint. And she's a good example of that, and maybe a better example of that than some of her contemporaries, like Susan Sontag, for example, who I think people also turn to a lot in this moment, but maybe have turned to in a more unbroken way since. I think of her as writing in a more impersonal voice than Hardwick, not putting in the kind of winking cameos that Hardwick will put in. And so maybe, maybe now is the moment where people are wanting to know how to write from a more limited or selected first personal perspective. And she helps with that. She certainly helps me with that. 

Jessica Swoboda  43:09

Yeah. I'm wondering if you can say a bit more about that. What's your relationship to the first person "I"? What is Emily ogden's "I"?

Emily Ogden  43:15

Yeah. I mean, in the point essay, I didn't necessarily think that we needed to see me anywhere because I didn't know her. You know, it'd be that people are, of course, still living who did, and Pinckney is a good example. So when Pinckney is writing about her, you know who geral Pinckney is in his writing, but in another writing that I've done, I want to have a kind of speaker in the way the poets will talk about having a speaker who is, of course, in many ways, me, but in other ways, a kind of processing of me, or like a certain vantage point on me, um, or maybe even, and this is something Hardwick does well, and that I have sometimes tried to do in other writing, a me particularly available for certain kinds of criticisms. So you know somebody who has certain kinds of privilege, but isn't necessarily like using the essay as an as an opportunity to to confess and self castigate for those kinds of privilege, but rather is like sort of using the self as an empirical example of that kind of privilege. And if the if the reader wants to then criticize, let them. I think she does that. And I think it's, it's a really interesting kind of move that some of our discourse on the personal essay doesn't really seem to realize the even the possibility of, let alone the kind of frequency of in the course of 20th century writing. So I, I like her for that, and I, I think it would be good to have a more writing like that. You know, I think it's a good kind of writing to have in the world. 

Jessica Swoboda  44:56

Well, Emily, thank you so much for joining us again. It's been great to talk to you about Hardwick, Hardwick's essay and your essay as well. So thank you so much. Thank

Emily Ogden  45:04

you both. It's really been a pleasure.

Zach Fine  45:06

Thanks Emily.

Jessica Swoboda  45:10

Thanks everyone for joining us for this episode of selected essays. We'd like to thank John Trevaskis for editing the podcast and Meg Duffy of Hand Habits for contributing the original music. As always, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And please subscribe to The Point. There's a discount code for listeners in the show notes. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selected essays at the pointmag.com We'd love to hear from you. Until next time, listeners.