Discussed in this essay:

The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Darryl Pinckney. NYRB Classics. 640 pages. $19.95.

Elizabeth Hardwick was drawn to the stifled shriek of the psyche in a world ruled by force. She saw how force works: how it stomps, cuts, beats, kills — and coddles, tickles, dances, flirts, holding out its bitter pleasures and dreary consolations to the striving, the deluded, and the weak. “The weak have the purest sense of history,” she once wrote. “Anything can happen.” But Hardwick is merely remembered, when she’s remembered, as a stylist, a glamorous irrelevance fashioning her slanted…