Monthly Archives: November 2022

On biography and other peoples’ lives

Posted on by
1

I recently came across two long reviews of A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwicke, by Cathy Curtis.      All I knew about Elizabeth Hardwicke was that she had married the American poet Robert Lowell, was prominent in the New York literary scene, was a very well-respected literary critic and was one of the group of people who established The New York Review of Books in 1963.

I have always been a hesitant reader of biographies; and of autobiographies. At times reading the former I would stop reading, overcome with an uneasy feeling of intrusion, or spying, or even worse, schadenfreude. How, I would wonder, thinking of my own life, could someone outside of me really know what was going on in my head, in my relationships, in my day-to-day existence, even if they could put me in the context of my times? How then could a biographer successfully capture the complexities of another’s life, often having never known them, reliant on others’ memories and interpretations, fragments left of a life, strands of long gone, old writings, old documents, photos, mementos which so ambiguously surround one. And autobiographies and memoirs, with all the underlying strains of the writer searching for meaning in the constant struggle of their living, wavering through the need for hubris and the need for privacy, the outbursts, the silences. Or even more disappointingly, the obvious papering over of what others on the outside can guess at but which the protagonist wants to deny. A minefield all round. And yet biographies, autobiographies and memoirs continue to pour forth and we, the onlookers, continue to read them, and more importantly, often learn a great deal from them, especially about the social and historical context surrounding lives.  

And so it would be should I ever get round to reading Cathy Curtis’s book. It is now on my long list of books to read. 

Elizabeth Hardwicke, it appears was, like all of us, a woman of many contradictions: a woman of great determination and ambition, a writer of two published novels, a trenchant critic of renown, a feminist, who, at her most caustic was able to rail against marriage in a letter to her dear friend Mary McCarthy in 1973.  At the age of 57, a recent and unwitting divorcee, she described the husbands and wives at a writers’ residency she attended in Italy. Her picture of the compliant, supportive wife, whose only power is to create guilt – the revenge of wives – is shocking and quite vicious.

This from a woman who supported Robert Lowell through his many ‘episodes’ in mental institutions (today it is called bi-polar disorder), who raised their daughter through it all, who encouraged his writing during the 23 years of marriage, (as well as endeavouring to foster her own literary ambitions) only to be told in trans-Atlantic correspondence that the marriage was over, and she was to be replaced with a younger English wifely version, writer Lady Caroline Blackwood. Even more egregious, she was to discover that Lowell would later use and alter her private correspondence with him in the last highly acclaimed work of his sonnet sequence, The Dolphin, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1974.

Lowell died in a taxi en route to visit Hardwicke on his return to New York in 1977 after the collapse of his last marriage.  Elizabeth Hardwicke died in 2007.  The very public nature of this long relationship between Hardwicke and Lowell has been described variously as ‘a tormented and tormenting one’, as ‘restless and emotionally harrowing’…

What to make of this extraordinary contradiction in Hardwicke’s life? Does the passage of twenty-three years of sharing a terrible struggle with mood disorders bring with it an enduring sense of responsibility on the part of the onlooking partner? Does simply the passage of shared years imbue relationships with a deeper sense of connection? What of the shared intellectual lives? The years of talking about ideas, language, poetry, literature, shared passions? What to make of all of these strands? Do they in the end amount to what we call loyalty? Is loyalty ever-enduring? At what point can a loyal person call it quits? What are the moral consequences? And what part does that elusive concept of love play in it all? Who can ever tell now what drove that relationship forward? Probably even then the protagonists themselves would not be able to unravel its mysteries. 

So maybe the point of thinking about other people’s lives, about biographies and autobiographies, is to make us ponder on these questions, to take them into our own lives, to force us to move forward one way or the other.  Ah, the complexities of the human condition and the power of the written word.

What happened to Spring?

Posted on by
1

Here we are, almost officially into summer, and yet we have seen little of the typical spring weather we in Adelaide so look forward to – days of blue skies with light clouds nudged across the sky from time to time by the light breezes from somewhere southerly, a gentle warmth, the odd shower to keep the burgeoning spring growth flourishing. This is when some of us begin to think about having our first swim in the gulf waters, those of us who are not ‘icebreakers’ who swim throughout the winter that is. This year the relentless storm fronts from the west continue to wreak havoc, bringing down trees and power lines, the soil is drenched with rain, leaving water to sit on top of the sodden ground, the sea is muddy with the detritus of urban existence gushing through the storm drains of the suburbs, and the Riverland towns are bracing for the flood waters that are getting nearer every day as the northern torrential rains make their slow way through the Darling and its tributaries to the Murray river. In the eastern states, entire towns have been inundated, leaving behind devastation, confusion and despair, and populations questioning how to cope with these life changing weather patterns we have never seen in our lifetimes.

Cliimate scientists and meteorologists tell us (based on evidence they have carefully collected) that the erratic weather patterns are occurring as a result of the warming of the planet. Their colleagues around the world are monitoring this warming , and warning us that we are almost (if not already) reaching the tipping point from which it will be impossible to keep this trajectory below safe levels for human habitation. Others are highlighting what it is about human habitation that is adding to this climate catastrophe, pointing to carbon and methane emissions, among other things, which we can trace back to the extremely comfortable lives we in the developed world enjoy, with our access to cars and airplanes, and ocean cruises, and access to food out of season from anywhere in the world due to mass agricultural production and international transport services. All this whilst we point our fingers at the less developed countries for not doing enough, largely because they want to have good lives like we do, as millions of their people struggle just to find enough food to stay alive. 

Meanwhile smart capitalists have seen the writing on the wall and are divesting themselves of investments in fossil fuels, for example, moving their billions into renewable energy projects in search of new profits.  Lagging a fair way behind, but now beginning to get their acts in gear, governments from around the world are meeting regularly to try and work out (of course always keeping their national interest at the forefront of their minds) what we need to do if we are to have any chance of combatting this catastrophe which is and will have increasingly devastating effects on human habitation on Earth.

What I find astounding about this situation is that I still come across climate change denialists, vehemently arguing that none of this, as described above, is really happening. Throughout time, they say, there have always been these up and downs in climate patterns. It is natural occurrence and has nothing to do with us human beings. You can’t trust today’s scientists, or modern science , they say. It is all a conspiracy. So there are some animal extinctions occurring now, they say. There have always been animal extinctions – look at the dinosaurs. It is just a natural progression of things; nothing to do with our human interactions on the earth we live in. They pop up everywhere in unexpected places, in governments, in schools and universities, in religious communities, in our local neighbourhoods. And no arguments, backed by evidence to the contrary, seem to change their minds. Reasoning, based on evidence, no longer seems to count. The Bureau of Meteorology is forecasting a beautiful spring day in a couple of days’ time (if a little warmer than usual). No more horizontal rain ripping through our suburban gardens, with gale force winds bringing down huge eucalypts (until the next time). We will put all of that out of our minds and take to our beach walks again with our friends and our dogs. All will seem well with the world – for the time being that is – and the climate catastrophe will sink into temporary oblivion, because at an everyday level it is just too big to contemplate, too big to handle. And so life continues.