Curtis skillfully tracks how the Southerner became a consummate New Yorker ... Curtis recounts in resonant detail Hardwick’s demanding life in New York, Europe, and Maine, charting each phase in her passionately intellectual and artistic life, and adeptly lacing her involving and invaluable chronicle with exquisite passages from her subject’s letters and published works, ensuring that Hardwick’s etched crystal voice radiates in all its resplendent beauty, valor, and knowingness.
To be a literary biographer is to court the extravagant ridicule of the very people you write about. For all of the salutary services a writer’s biography can offer—the tracing of the life, the contextualizing of the work, the resuscitation of a reputation and the deliverance from neglect—the biographer has been derided as a ‘post-mortem exploiter’ (Henry James) and a ‘professional burglar’ (Janet Malcolm) … Curtis, whose previous subjects include the midcentury painters Grace Hartigan and Elaine de Kooning, has written the kind of straightforward, informative book that Hardwick frequently deplored—a ‘scrupulous accounting of time’ (as Hardwick derisively put it), a recitation of the facts that stretch across Hardwick’s long life, with scarcely little that truly captures the compressed intensity of the work itself. Still, the book is a start … Curtis assiduously chronicles the literary panels, the gossip and the ailments of Hardwick’s later years, before she died in 2007, observing the rhythms of Hardwick’s work while never quite falling into sync with them. But then a march is different from a dance, even if each has its own choreography.”
Curtis is a keen archivist ... While Curtis’s attention to detail indulges commotion in some places, in most others it fascinates. Specific to biographies of writers is the difficulty of filtering the written word. Surely, there is a line—however thin—between the subject as the writer and the subject as the person outside the performance. Here too it is difficult to see Elizabeth Hardwick outside her occupation as a writer. From Curtis’s account, it is easy to admire the writer and just as difficult to comprehend the person beneath ... Robert Lowell...crowds the biography from the moment he is introduced and long after the point he and Hardwick part ways. In these parts, it is impossible to adore Hardwick, and yet this is perhaps where she is most human. Most vulnerable. These parts made me wonder if Elizabeth Hardwick would have appreciated this exhibition of her vulnerabilities. Perhaps not, Cathy Curtis admits. Curtis has no fear in evidencing Hardwick’s lack of trust and appreciation towards the genre. So, 'why would anyone want to write a biography?' Maybe, Curtis is also filled with that selfish, almost violent interest that plagues so many of us readers. We all want to know where the novel ends and the person begins. The biography is a curious genre; it demands a voyeurism, an inquisitiveness—from both its writer and its reader—for a micro-history. The genre therefore seems to demand that some very private lives be almost made a public resource—open for examination to assuage our curiosities. But to also record and to remember.
Much of what we learn about her in the biography involves a certain everydayness, not the flashing of a brilliant mind at work. She is getting surgery on her middle toes or dealing with bacterial illnesses. Other days, it’s leaky roofs and squirrels, packing and unpacking, acquiring furniture and handling suitcases. This is the stuff of life; I am not faulting Curtis for including it (especially if this is all we really can know about Hardwick). But the regrettable impression one gets from the biography is that Elizabeth Hardwick is not exactly worth knowing. The complexity and interestingness of her writing seems to exist at a mysterious remove from her life, which is lived by a person who, at least on record, spends a lot of time gossiping, griping, and scolding other people ... One starts to wonder: where is the person who the poet Derek Walcott once described as 'more fun than any American writer I have known'? ... With Hardwick’s short stories and essays, Curtis tends to summarize them, and then give telegraphic appraisals ... But she does not engage with Hardwick’s much-admired style. The biography is much more interested in stances. There is a diligent accounting, for instance, of her troubled relationship to feminism, and her concern for the poor and working class.
Ms. Curtis’s narrative comes alive when she quotes Hardwick’s devastating, strongly turned formulations about her husband ... Ms. Curtis is seldom moved to disagree with or correct Hardwick’s accounts, nor to persevere in a close look at how Hardwick’s sentences work to form convincing portraits of her subjects ... This may be a case in which more means less, when the parade of accolades is substituted for close engagement with the writing. It is a problem any biographer, certainly one as scrupulous as Ms. Curtis, has to face. I think she would agree in calling Hardwick, with her 'discrete observations and unusual metaphors,' a writer’s writer, but critical demonstration is needed to make the label stick, something that can’t be done by a biography concerned to get all the names in.
Curtis stumbles out of the gate with her description of Hardwick's Southern upbringing—her text is quote-heavy throughout, and this reader longed for a more evocative sense of Hardwick's Lexington childhood ... Curtis is on surer ground as she re-creates Hardwick's years as a brave young woman who moved north to New York and plunged into its intellectual and political life ... After Lowell's death in 1977, Hardwick recovered and flourished. Though Curtis continues to favor quotes at the expense of context, she conveys Hardwick's humor, glinting intellect and nonpareil prose ... The reader develops a deep regard for a gifted woman whose Southern charm masked enormous grit.
A biography whose disappointments often justify its subject’s skepticism of such efforts ... Today, readers want a rigorous biographer whose job isn’t to flatter—or flatten—the subject ... Alas, A Splendid Intelligence is no corrective in this sense. Curtis hews closely to a traditional format, keeping the biographer at a remove, occupying the role of an archivist who presents evidence on a timeline ... Curtis quietly and predictably asserts Hardwick’s place in 20th century American letters as someone far more than a spurned wife ... This choice strikes an oddly defensive chord. Drawing immediate attention to her relationship with Lowell merely reinforces this association ... I could think of countless moments that would speak more powerfully by example. Instead, Curtis moves from that brief introduction to a largely dry and linear chronicle of her life ... The book builds momentum in tandem with Hardwick’s career as her marriage with Lowell takes on a certain magnetic inevitability ... Curtis’ respectable impulse to downplay the period prevents her from examining what brought Hardwick to this point in her marriage after Lowell’s infidelities and mental health interventions — and, more importantly, what she was able to accomplish after she broke loose ... Where the biography picks up considerably is its final chapter ... A Splendid Intelligence is an admirable work that fills a glaring void in the 20th century American literary landscape. Yet there’s something in her project that cries out for a less conventional approach ... While it’s unclear whether A Splendid Intelligence will draw new readers to Hardwick, it’s a necessary and welcome biography, raising larger questions about literary influence and biography’s role in literary prestige — even if it doesn’t always answer them.
The Hardwick-Lowell marriage comprises the heart of A Splendid Intelligence...despite an early disclaimer that we won’t hear much about Lowell ... Curtis...complicates our understanding of Hardwick’s feminism, such as it was, noting that she was less complacent about women’s struggles than she appeared ... Curtis treats Hardwick’s work with respect and admiration, though her detailed, dutiful summaries of essays and fiction sometimes grow tedious, and come at the expense of historical context and literary insight ... If we get too many details about the work, we sometimes get too few about the life. Curtis skims over Hardwick’s childhood and adolescence in Kentucky and her relationship with her parents, who are shadowy figures here. Alarming suggestions of sexual assault are dropped into the narrative and left to sit, unexplored ... I wanted to know more about Hardwick’s sustaining friendships with McCarthy, Sontag, Rich, Bishop and Arendt — legends whose names appear often, but mostly in outline. Curtis quotes from letters among these brilliant women, but does not really probe the deeper currents of their affections, alliances and rivalries. Still, I finished this book with a strong sense of Hardwick’s resolve and intelligence. Hardwick, who hated biographies, might have approved.
Curtis...clearly appreciates her subject ... This focus on Hardwick as a stylist, however well deserved, has obscured other aspects of her life. Curtis, to her credit, attempts illumination ... We learn that she and Lowell rented a Renault during a trip to the Loire Valley in 1951; that their house in Duxbury, thirty-five miles south of Boston, was built in 1740; and that she installed cable TV in their summer home in Maine, so that she could watch tennis. Awash in such details, one can’t help but recall Hardwick’s review of a Hemingway biography: 'The bland, insistent recording of the insignificant, respectful, worshipful as it is, cannot honor a human being and it is particularly useless in the case of a writer—outstandingly inappropriate' ... The best way to understand a writer is to interpret the work, something that Curtis mostly refuses to do.
It’s refreshing to read a history of Hardwick that lasts more than a few paragraphs and pictures her solo ... informational, fact-centric, unsurprisingly since Curtis is not only a biographer, she was once a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. That’s underscored, however, by a lack of living voices contributing to Hardwick’s account ... The best moments of the biography are when Hardwick’s own voice gushes forth, primarily in anecdotes from her later years ... Her voice, when captured, lifts her portrait out of black-and-white.
Robert Lowell tumbles, swerves, and skids through these pages like a selfish demon ... Their marriage dominates two hundred of the three hundred and eight pages of A Splendid Intelligence, and it presents a structural problem for Curtis ... The marriage was no doubt the central drama of Hardwick’s life. Many passages read like a summary with quotations of an as-yet-unpublished volume of Hardwick’s letters ... Curtis...favors the chronological litany over the discrete series of thematic syntheses. Work and life are treated in tandem, the latter often overwhelming the former, not least because marital strife has a higher quotient of drama than the composition of essays and reviews ... Curtis’s decision not to cordon off the work from the life leads to some awkward transitions ... Curtis’s book is conscientious and chronological to a fault, but it lacks any literary feeling, any sense of the dynamic between Hardwick the critic and her subjects. Many of her glosses on Hardwick’s criticism are perfunctory, as if the biographer is eager to get back to the messy marriage.
... admirably researched and supplies the reader with a thorough account of Hardwick’s calendar life, complete with names, dates, places, publication summaries, and—most important—a remarkably well-organized portrait of the chaos that dogged the Lowell-Hardwick marriage. Everything one could ever want in a biography is here. Everything but Hardwick herself. There are not many places in the book where one feels the live presence of the woman who made herself up from Kentucky scratch, was instrumental in bringing new life to a long-neglected genre, worshipped art but identified with the sleaze and dereliction of the city, and dreaded not so much the reality as the stigma of a woman alone ... It’s the inner life of that woman—the one who wrote the celebrated essays—that we want on the page, but it’s not here; just as it wasn’t 40-odd years ago, when I took her to task for not writing in the voice of a militant feminist 20 years her junior. Hardwick deserved better then, and she deserves better now.
... [an] entertaining biography ... Curtis does an admirable job of weaving together her sources, but Hardwick herself can get lost amid the many famous figures she rubbed shoulders with (and who feature prominently here). Still, fans of Hardwick will find this a good place to start, and it doubles as a satisfying look at the writer’s milieu.
Readers may wish for a less constrained exploration of this complex individual, but Curtis brings to light a cultural fixture deserving of more attention. An engaging and well-documented yet somewhat anemic portrait of a brilliant and deeply opinionated writer.
