Obituaries

The literary critic who co-founded The New York Review of Books

Elizabeth Hardwick grew up a Protestant Southern belle in Kentucky, but joked that she always wanted to be a New York Jewish intellectual. Among the last of a hard-drinking, promiscuous circle of intellectuals that included her husband, the poet Robert Lowell, Hardwick also was an eloquent champion of such tortured female literary icons as Sylvia Plath, Zelda Fitzgerald, and the Brontë sisters. Political philosopher Isaiah Berlin once called her the most intelligent woman he had ever met.

The eighth of 11 children, Hardwick graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1938, said The New York Times. She moved to New York the following year to take doctoral courses at Columbia University. Quickly slipping into a bohemian lifestyle, she shared an apartment “with a young gay man, Greer Johnson, joining him in nightly searches for good jazz.” She was briefly a member of the Communist Party. As she later recounted in her autobiographical novel, Sleepless Nights, she scraped by on fellowship money while pursuing a life signified by “love and alcohol and the clothes on the floor.” Her goal, she told an interviewer in 1979, “was to be a New York Jewish intellectual. I say ‘Jewish’ because of their tradition of rational skepticism; and also a certain deracination appeals to me—and their openness to European culture.”

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Hardwick met Lowell at a party in Greenwich Village in 1946, said the London Guardian. She had dropped out of Columbia and had already published several short stories in literary magazines, as well as her first novel, The Ghostly Lover. Lowell, regarded as the most gifted poet in English of his generation, was “already launched on a lifetime of manic depression,” and was in the middle of an acrimonious divorce from his first wife, writer Jean Stafford. Hardwick and Lowell met again at Yaddo, the writers’ colony in upstate New York, and married in 1949. Before their honeymoon was over, Lowell went through a particularly violent psychotic phase and had to be confined in a hospital, where he underwent shock treatment.

In the early 1950s, Hardwick and Lowell lived in a series of university towns, said The New York Sun. “Their relationship seemed always tempestuous, mainly on account of Lowell’s manic depression and womanizing.” Hardwick continued to write about such diverse subjects as Lee Harvey Oswald’s widow, Mick Jagger, and the decline of book reviewing. In late 1962, during the middle of a New York newspaper strike, she and Lowell were visiting their friends Jason and Barbara Epstein when they conceived the idea of creating The New York Review of Books. The first issue, in February 1963, was laid out in Hardwick’s apartment. The paper continued to publish after the strike, with the Epsteins serving as publisher and editor, and Hardwick listed as “advisory editor.”

Hardwick “thrived” after the Review was founded, said the London Times. Its reviews served as “the center of debate during the turbulent ’60s” as it became increasingly focused on such events as the Vietnam War and John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But her patience with Lowell ended in 1972, when she divorced him after discovering his affair with the writer Lady Caroline Blackwood. “Once out of Lowell’s troubled shadow,” she was able to pursue her own literary career. Among her published works during this period was the acclaimed Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (1974). Yet she and Lowell remained close. He died of a heart attack in 1977, in the back of a taxi on the way to her apartment.

In an interview in 1984 with The Paris Review, Hardwick talked about growing older. “Its only value is that it spares you the opposite, not growing older,” she said. “Oh, the dear grave. I like what [German essayist] Gottfried Benn wrote, something like, ‘May I die in the spring when the ground is soft and easy to plough.’”

The composer who was the genius-madman of modern music

Karlheinz Stockhausen, who liked to claim he was descended from astral beings, was regarded by many of his avant-garde contemporaries as the most significant German composer since Richard Wagner. His 362 published works include Licht, the world’s longest opera. A series of seven pieces, one for each day of the week, Licht takes 29 hours to perform. Another piece, Gruppen, was written for 109 players who are instructed to divide into three groups to surround the audience.

Stockhausen was born near Cologne, the son of a Catholic schoolteacher who became a German army officer, said the Los Angeles Times. His mother, who suffered from chronic depression, was euthanized by the Nazis, and he later served as a stretcher-bearer in a military hospital. After the war, he became a disciple of Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique known as serialism, studied under composer Olivier Messiaen in Paris, and experimented with electronic compositions. In the mid-1960s, he was teaching at the University of California-Davis when he came under the “radicalizing” influence of astrology and the hippie lifestyle, “although he apparently rejected drugs.” His works during this period included Mantra for two pianos and electronics, and Hymnen, an electronic composition based on national anthems.

He was “undoubtedly a charismatic personality,” said the Montreal Gazette, but he could also be confounding. In Aus dem siegen Tagen (From the Seven Days), Stockhausen provided a verse of text for each section to suggest the mood the players must create. One reads: “Live completely alone for four days, without food in complete silence, without much movement. After four days, late at night, without talking beforehand, play single sounds without thinking what you are playing. Close your eyes. Just listen.”

Despite his reputation as one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music, said the London Telegraph, Stockhausen cared little for worldly possessions. He was photographed for decades wearing the same jacket. He also inspired both jazz legend Miles Davis and the Beatles, who included his photograph on the collage cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But he provoked widespread outrage when he called the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.” He later apologized, saying that his allegorical remarks had been misunderstood.