Most people who were interested in poetry in the late twentieth century know at least the vague outlines of this story. In 1974, Robert Lowell published a book of poems called The Dolphin, a series which cannibalized the letters he had received from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, as he was leaving her in the early 1970s for his third wife, Caroline Blackwood (a Guinness heiress who was herself the ex-wife of the artist Lucian Freud and the composer Israel Citkowitz). The controversy that swirled around the book hinged on the moral violation of using Hardwick’s private letters—and, still worse, rewriting them—in a collection that was essentially a love letter to another woman. Years later, when the marriage to Caroline was breaking up, Lowell returned to Hardwick, and they spent the summer of 1977 together in Maine; in September, though, he died of a heart attack in the taxi that was bringing him home to her New York apartment.
Now Saskia Hamilton has performed the miraculous editorial task of putting together all of the actual letters: Elizabeth’s to Robert (whom she and others called “Cal”), his to her, plus assorted missives to and from other members of their circle during this fraught time, which dated from mid-1970 to Robert’s death and beyond. In The Dolphin Letters, Hamilton has scrupulously arranged and annotated this correspondence in a way that makes us feel immersed in the situation ourselves—if not as participants, then as close bystanders. Robert Lowell comes across as brilliant, erratic, and morally obtuse; both he and Caroline seem incompetent in the handling of daily life to an almost criminal degree (considering that they were in charge of four children); and meanwhile Elizabeth Hardwick appears as — I was going to say “a saint,” but she was too appealingly human for that; and then I was going to say “a tower of strength,” but was prevented by the memory of her own joke (repeated in one of the letters) about a fellow New Yorker who was “a tower of weakness.”
Hardwick’s letters are distinguished throughout by their honesty, their expressiveness, and their flashes of great wit. (Commenting on a positive review about Stanley Kunitz, whose poetry she finds “thin and disappointing,” she says to Lowell, the review’s author: “I will say as someone said about Christianity: ‘Important, if true.'”) It is during these years, too, that she really comes into her own as a writer, forced by finances as well as emotional stress to produce some of her best work; crucially, the divorce frees her from treating Lowell’s career as more important than her own. Throughout, she never ceases to sign her letters to Cal “with love” — and he in turn continues to address her as “Dearest Lizzie” and sign off “with all my love” even after he has married Caroline and had a son with her. But we also get moments of intense anguish, mainly on Elizabeth’s part but sometimes (when he is going into or emerging from one of his periods of madness) on his. It is a gripping story, and though I knew the outcome in advance, I was on the edge of my seat for the entire time I was reading it. The letters between the two of them of course form the core of the narrative, but there are equally important messages from those around them—in particular Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell’s best friend, who warned him in advance, in one of the most intelligent, loving, and powerful letters I’ve ever read, that he would be committing a moral atrocity if he used Lizzie’s correspondence in this way.
Perhaps I was more gripped than most would be because I knew or knew of the principals. I was friends with Elizabeth Hardwick during the 1980s and the 1990s, when I visited New York as a young person getting my toes wet in the New York literary world and stayed at her apartment. I had met Robert Lowell once in 1970, on the day I—an overly ambitious freshman—attended the first meeting of his poetry seminar at Harvard and then fled, suitably intimidated; and eight or nine years later I reviewed his last and posthumously published collection, Day by Day, for the Berkeley Poetry Review. But I think even if you had never read a word by either of these people, you would find this book of letters compelling. It is as intense and as beautifully composed as a well-constructed epistolary novel, but with the added force of being all quite real.