{"id":1082,"date":"2020-01-14T10:26:09","date_gmt":"2020-01-14T17:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=1082"},"modified":"2020-01-29T16:52:34","modified_gmt":"2020-01-29T23:52:34","slug":"the-dolphin-letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/the-dolphin-letters\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dolphin Letters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most people who were interested in poetry in the late twentieth century know at least the vague outlines of this story. In\u00a01974, Robert Lowell published a book of poems called The Dolphin<\/em>, a series which cannibalized the letters he had received from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, as he was leaving her in the early 1970s\u00a0for 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\u2014and, still worse, rewriting them\u2014in a collection\u00a0that was essentially a love letter to another woman. Years later, when the marriage to Caroline was breaking up, Lowell\u00a0returned to Hardwick, and they spent the\u00a0summer of 1977 together in Maine;\u00a0in\u00a0September, though,\u00a0he died of a heart attack in the taxi that was bringing him home to her New York apartment.<\/p>\n

Now Saskia Hamilton has performed the miraculous editorial task of putting together all\u00a0of the actual letters:\u00a0Elizabeth’s to Robert (whom she and others called “Cal”), his to her, plus assorted missives to and from\u00a0other members of their circle during this fraught time, which dated from mid-1970 to Robert’s death and beyond. In\u00a0The Dolphin Letters<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0Hamilton\u00a0has scrupulously arranged and annotated this correspondence\u00a0in a way that makes us\u00a0feel immersed in the situation ourselves\u2014if 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\u00a0daily life to an almost criminal degree (considering that they were in charge of four\u00a0children); and meanwhile Elizabeth Hardwick appears as \u2014 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\u00a0(repeated in one of the letters) about a fellow New Yorker who was\u00a0“a tower of weakness.”<\/p>\n

Hardwick’s\u00a0letters are distinguished throughout by their honesty, their expressiveness, and their flashes of great wit. (Commenting on a positive review about\u00a0Stanley Kunitz, whose poetry she finds\u00a0“thin and disappointing,” she says to Lowell, the review’s author: “I will say as someone\u00a0said 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\u00a0Lowell’s career as\u00a0more important than her own. Throughout, she\u00a0never ceases to sign her letters to Cal\u00a0“with love”\u00a0\u2014 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\u00a0part 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\u00a0between the two of them of course form the core of the narrative, but there are equally important messages from those around them\u2014in particular Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell’s best friend, who warned him in advance, in one of the most intelligent, loving, and powerful letters\u00a0I’ve ever read, that he would be committing a moral atrocity if he used Lizzie’s correspondence\u00a0in this way.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I was more gripped than most would be because I knew or knew of the principals. I was friends with Elizabeth Hardwick\u00a0during 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\u00a0the day I\u2014an overly ambitious freshman\u2014attended the first meeting of his poetry seminar at Harvard\u00a0and then fled, suitably intimidated; and eight or nine years\u00a0later I reviewed his last and posthumously published\u00a0collection,\u00a0Day by Day,<\/em>\u00a0for the Berkeley Poetry Review<\/em>. But I think even if you had never read a word by either of these people, you would find this book of letters\u00a0compelling. It is as intense and as beautifully composed as a well-constructed epistolary novel, but with the added force of being all quite real.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most people who were interested in poetry in the late twentieth century know at least the vague outlines of this story. In\u00a01974, Robert Lowell published a book of poems called The Dolphin, a series which cannibalized the letters he had … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[624,620,625,621,623,622],"class_list":["post-1082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-elizabeth-bishop","tag-elizabeth-hardwick","tag-farrar-straus-and-giroux","tag-robert-lowell","tag-saskia-hamilton","tag-the-dolphin-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1082"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1091,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1082\/revisions\/1091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}