Artist in Aphorism

A VIEW OF MY OWN (214 pp.)-- Elizabeth Hardwick--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($4.50).

Good female prose, if properly clipped of gush, has the kind of alert precision that makes most masculine sentences seem like so much unfinished business. As writers, women are usually mistresses of microcosm: their themes may not be large, but their literary housekeeping is unassailable--the commas properly placed, the exact word found to match an idea or thing. One of the better U.S. dispensers of this feminine mot justice is Elizabeth Hardwick, the wife of Poet Robert Lowell. Judging by this first collection of her essays and book reviews--most of them fugitives from oblivion in Partisan Review--she is also an artist in aphorism who deserves, at her best, comparison with Mary McCarthy or Virginia Woolf.

As essay gatherings go, A View of My Own is oddly uneven, since the deft Hardwick prose has occasionally been put to work at drab tasks. There are forgettable reviews of forgotten books, a surprisingly maudlin attempt to explain the death and nine legal lives of Caryl Chessman as an indictment of the U.S. inability to understand its youth. But Hardwick also writes with wit and accuracy about the proud, faded elegance of Boston, a city, she argues, "that is not a small New York, as they say a child is not a small adult, but is, rather, a specially organized small creature with its small-creature's temperature, balance and distribution of fat." Her recollection of the aging, epicene art critic Bernard Berenson, living out his dotage in Florence as if he were the celebrant of some exquisite secular liturgy, is a masterpiece of kindly malice.

Other women writers bring out the best in her shrewd, sharp judgment. She displays a witchy admiration for the "tart effervescence" of Mary McCarthy, accurately noting that the cool, almost brutal realism of her sexual passages is light-years away from the passion-tinged descriptions of male writers. One notorious McCarthy story, she writes, "is about contraception in the way, for instance, that Frank Norris's The Octopus is about wheat. There is an air of imparting information--like whaling in Melville." Reviewing Simone de Beauvoir's prolix attack on male imperialism. The Second Sex, Hardwick pricks its Utopian pretension that women are stronger and better than men in a commonsensical line: "Any woman who has ever had her wrist twisted by a man recognizes a fact of nature as humbling as a cyclone to a frail tree branch."

What is best about the essays is not Writer Hardwick's critical conclusions, which tend to be prudent rather than profound, but her rare talent for skewering a flaw or evoking a literary presence in a single, ringing epigram. Items:

ON ENGLAND'S LITERARY FAMILIES:

"The Brownings, the Webbs, the Garnetts, the Carlyles, Leonard and Virginia Woolf --the English literary couple is a peculiar domestic manufacture, useful no doubt in a country with difficult winters. Before the bright fire at teatime, we can see these high-strung men and women clinging together, their inky fingers touching."

ON GRAHAM GREENE: "The question is not, in the great Russian manner, how one can live without God, or with God; the question is how one can exist as a moral, or immoral man, without running into vexing complications with the local priest."

ON MANHATTAN'S IMPOVERISHED PUERTO RICANS: "They are nomads going from one rooming house to another, looking for a toilet that functions."

ON F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: "He had, in the midst of chaos, the rather cross-eyed power of gazing upon his deterioration as if he were not living it but somehow observing his soul and body as one would watch a drop of water slowly drying up in the sun."

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