Letters Are Not Life

The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle, edited by Saskia Hamilton.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $50.00.

Saskia Hamilton, by now surely the patron saint of Lowelliana, has restored, with The Dolphin Letters, Elizabeth Hardwick’s answering voice to the period of vacillation and larceny which surrounded Lowell’s collection of 1973, The Dolphin. The poems are an autobiographical clutch of unrhymed sonnets, Lowell’s mode at the time, in which he plays out the breakdown of his marriage and the wranglings of his new relationship with Caroline Blackwood: “one man, two women, the common novel plot.” Hardwick believed that the—often painful, exposing, and mistreated—letters she sent to Lowell during the years surrounding its publication had been thrown away by Blackwood after his death in 1977, but as Hamilton explains in her introduction, they had been accounted for by Lowell: he sent them to his friend and sometime amanuensis Frank Bidart, for fear Hardwick would destroy them if they were returned. Their existence was acknowledged only after Hardwick’s death in 2007, and, with the aid of Bidart, Hamilton went about cataloging them in 2010, some five years after she edited Lowell’s collected letters, complete with his side of the correspondence. Their appearance helps to restore Lowell and Hardwick’s relations during the period into a dialogue, but also provides us with the sources for many poems from The Dolphin, which Lowell assembled, in part, by cannibalizing lines from Hardwick’s correspondence, altering and editing as he saw fit. He burgled the letters of other figures in his circle, too, including Elizabeth Bishop and Blackwood, but the controversy and pain caused by the collection was chiefly to do with his treatment of Hardwick’s writing during their prolonged marital breakdown, his refusal to listen to the advice of several friends including Bishop, and his mixing of fact with fiction: “this book, half fiction,/an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting” (“Dolphin”).

The Dolphin Letters begins just after Hardwick and Lowell had visited Italy together, still married, seemingly happily, and he had stayed on in Europe alone to take up a short fellowship at All Souls College in Oxford, a precursor to a mooted removal of the family to England in order for him to accept a job in Donald Davie’s old department in the University of Essex. Reading Hardwick’s letters to Lowell in England, one is quickly alert to a note of suspicious enervation in her tone, the rapidity of her escalation into a fear that all is not well. This suspicion would be well-founded at the best of times, given Lowell’s “old infection, [which] comes once yearly,” the manic depressive disorder which blighted his life, causing “lowered good humor, then an ominous/rise of irritable enthusiasm.” His manic periods not only caused “enthusiasm,” followed by depression, but usually coincided with a new romantic entanglement, some hastily-made promises of eternity to a new “girl” who was abandoned once equilibrium was restored. These affairs and the sheepish returns to Hardwick which followed them seem behind her concern at his silence in mid-May 1970, weeks after his trip to the UK began: “I guess we’ll never hear from you. I’m not even sure that you are still planning for us to come to England next year” (“we” being Hardwick and Harriet, her daughter with Lowell, then aged 13). Hardwick’s hunch was well-founded: Lowell had been reintroduced to Blackwood, a one-time acquaintance from his New York life, at a party given for him in London by his UK publishers Faber & Faber. He moved in with her the same night.

What immediately follows is a series of deflections and evasions on Lowell’s part, as well as seemingly boundless temerity: “About letters—I can’t pour them out,” he writes on May 26, a month into the affair. All the while Hardwick is making plans for her and Harriet to move, quitting her job at Barnard, preparing for a trip which they will not be making. There are several letters from Hardwick which put the heart across you, not least for their foreshadowing of what was to come a few years later, but one of the most affecting is sent care of Faber in late June, just before she discovers what, or rather who, has been delaying Lowell’s return to New York. “I must say I feel rather like a widow. Your things, you, your life, your family, your clothes, your work, your old shoes, ties, winter coats, books, everything seems sitting about at every turn.” Hardwick, the brilliant prose stylist, the lancingly astute critic, is seen in this book at several low ebbs; one feels at times cowed, or at least bashful, seeing such a figure vulnerable, panicked, and wounded, but she is throughout self-aware, scolding herself—partly in jest—for her reasonableness: “If I knew, right now, how not to be nice I would not be.” She is also resolute and, ultimately, triumphant, at least artistically, producing the essays which would become Seduction and Betrayal, as well as publishing Sleepless Nights, within the scope of this book—two great monuments, solider, more unobjectionable achievements than The Dolphin.

Hardwick garners not only one’s sympathy but one’s admiration. It was Hardwick who said to Lowell “why not say what really happened?” during the writing of Life Studies, his great breakthrough into an autobiographical style, what he describes to Christopher Ricks here as his “peculiar talent” for the “very personal.” One is cautious of awarding points, given that the letters themselves contain evidence of how lowering Hardwick found the idea of being judged on her attitude as the left party, as the dutiful wife, after Lowell’s use of her letters in his book. Lowell’s collection is poetry as wavering self-inflation, and Hardwick is one of its finest critics, in a letter she sends here to Bishop after its publication:

It seemed so sad that the work was, certainly in that part that relies upon me and Harriet, so inane, empty, unnecessary. I cannot understand how three years of work could have left so many fatuities, indiscretions, bad lines still there on the page.

She’s speaking from her wounds, certainly, but she isn’t wrong—gone by now is the stately, symbolist perfectionism of Life Studies and For the Union Dead; in its place is loquacity, an ice-chipper replaced with a chocolate fountain. There are still, given Lowell’s brilliance at the level of the line and the phrase, moments of beauty, and memorable epithets and descriptions, but he seems by this point of his writing career to operate from sentence to sentence, his sonnet form a trouser pocket turned inside out, displaying coins and fluff alike. Hardwick was hurt not only by Lowell’s decision to make public—albeit with maddening, arse-covering asides (“everything is real until it’s published”)—her heartbroken letters, but by his editing of them, his manipulation of the “narrative” of their break-up. Adrienne Rich would later criticize his “bullshit eloquence” in a review for the American Poetry Review, pouring scorn on his balancing of “injury to others” with “injury to myself” in the book’s final poem. His indiscretion knew no bounds, but neither did his impish meddling with fact, combining letters from different periods, among other crimes, misquoting Hardwick (“not that I wish you entirely well” for “I don’t entirely wish you well,” for example, changing and pointing her meaning) largely in the service of sustaining, in print and life, a belief that he was being fought over. Hardwick points to this in a letter she sends to Blair Clark, one of Lowell’s oldest friends, at the end of 1970—long before the poems in question had seen the light of day. Lowell had indicated that Blackwood may join him in New York on his visit at Christmas, something Hardwick suggested to Clark was “his fantasy and his need to keep a sense of our competing over him.”

The truth was that, however upset Hardwick was, she was carrying on her daily life, bringing up their daughter and writing enough to keep the lights on at home. Much of the correspondence here has to do with Lowell’s singular inability to look after any of the practical elements of life and Hardwick’s increasing frustrations in trying to get him to file a tax return or sign a document to allow her to sell the property in Castine left to her by his aunt Sarah. One can feel her boiling despair in these moments, not least during the protracted hold-up caused by his unwillingness to understand the legal position regarding Castine, his decision to involve Blackwood and her lawyers culminating in Hardwick’s nerve-shredded apoplexy: “Your letter saying Caroline didn’t understand what she was signing away has driven me nearly to the brink of suicide. I have written, cabled, done all I can.”

Though devastated, certainly, by his leaving her and Harriet, Hardwick on the whole maintains a superhuman composure and decency in her letters across the water but sometimes—and one almost cheers such moments—she explodes, as above, her prose turned to steam. More often there is a patient indulgence, and genuine concern—even after everything—the sort of unearned love one used to call grace. When she discovers that Lowell has been hospitalized for mania, and hears reports—which prove incorrect—that he’s been wandering the streets in pajamas and stealing from purses, she writes offering to visit him, sending love, consolation, and kindness but also reaffirming her own art, founded on self-composure: “I think if it hadn’t been for feeling that as a woman you owe it to yourself to preserve dignity and honesty and integrity I couldn’t have stood what has happened to me.” She misses him, of course, their twenty-plus years of marriage having withstood so much, but as is clear from letters to others, especially her great friend Mary McCarthy, his having left isn’t tragedy only. She is freed up to an extent, not least from the duty of care she has always maintained for him in his illness, and freed into writing. Notably, the essays she produces in this period are about women in literature—an insightful one on Sylvia Plath’s violence but also on Ibsen’s women, Jane Carlyle, and other figures who dwelt in the shadow of noisier male companions. Of Nora in A Doll’s House, she writes, “Nora’s leaving her husband can scarcely rivet our attention. The only thing more common and unremarkable would be her husband’s leaving her.”

The role of Hardwick as minder is a seam running through this book: when necessity requires it, her instinct is to drop animosity and visit Lowell in London, sitting with him, cutting his hair, getting him straight—it’s habit, but it’s also character. She is aware of the sacrifices being made, just as she is of Lowell’s dissolution, taking him to task for his new, “parasitic” life as a rich woman’s trophy: “You cannot live on Caroline, step into the sheets of Israel Citkowitz and all those weak people without diminishment,” or, later, to the fallout of this lifestyle, the cost to his honor. Writing to McCarthy about his return to New York for Christmas, Hardwick is clear-eyed about him, no lovestruck competitor:

I was shocked when I saw him because the person I had been missing so painfully was the rare, glorious person of at least a decade ago and when I saw him at the airport, disheveled, that darting wild look in his eye, heard the eternal jokes, it was just so pitiful.

While Hardwick defaults to the role of caretaker, Lowell is used to, indeed expects, concession. Hardwick wrote to McCarthy from London while getting Lowell back on his feet that he “accepts our efforts like an invalid Archbishop, seeing nothing extraordinary in the service.” The clerical analogy is apt—Lowell in this period, like the medieval church, seems to run on indulgences. That, perhaps, is partly behind his decision to publish The Dolphin complete with Hardwick’s cut-up correspondence, despite several warnings not to from friends, concerned not only for the sake of decency and Hardwick’s feelings but for his own reputation, the ammunition it will give those in the world already inclined to level charges against him. The most insistent and persuasive voice—though still largely ignored—is that of Bishop. Her letter about the issue, “art just isn’t worth that much,” invoking the behavior of a gentleman and Hardy’s adage about the “infinite mischief” of mixing fact with fiction is already well known from their correspondence. We come to see that Lowell’s version of seeking advice roughly equates to looking for praise and ignoring criticism, although with Bishop he does at least begin to see the need for some alteration (despite a maddening letter in which he “reframes” her concerns which need no reframing). He can’t bear the thought of not publishing—at this point one feels he couldn’t bear an unpublished thought. To that end he comes up with several justifications, unbirthed child metaphors, and in the end, as a version of conscience assuagement, decides to reorder his “narrative.” The extent of his changes can now be seen thanks to Hamilton’s newly published The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972–1973, in which the original manuscript as circulated to his horrified friends in 1972 can be read as it was. The nub of his alterations, other than on the line level, is a shifting of the birth of his son with Blackwood, Robert Sheridan Lowell, from the end of the book, and the “resolution” coming instead in the shape of a trip back to New York to visit Hardwick which occurred much earlier, when many more questions surrounded it. An interesting contrast in the taking on of “feedback” is presented by Hardwick’s correspondence with Bishop about a printed anecdote of Hardwick’s on Lota de Macedo Soares, Bishop’s late partner. Hardwick couldn’t be more considerate of Bishop’s concerns about any misrepresentation, promising to alter or excise them, writing back out of sorrowful experience that “in the end it doesn’t matter whether these things are ‘true’ or ‘unfavorable’ in the usual sense; you just can’t help but weep with pain as you are tossed in someone’s work.”

The thrust of Lowell’s oscillating affections seems in the main to come from the fact that no one is real unless they’re in front of him. His nostalgic poems looking back and his tragiflirtatious later letters to Hardwick all seem symptomatic of his existing only in lost retrospect or immediate impulse. In one of Hardwick’s saddest letters she talks about how “I couldn’t come to England with you as I so wanted to ... perhaps you would have kept your love for us if we hadn’t been separated.” It is only toward the end of the book that Blackwood’s breakdown throws Lowell into the role of concerned, helpless party—a humanizing reversal in Hardwick’s eyes. Hardwick writes movingly to McCarthy about the effect of this: “I have never known him to take such care—it may not be much, knowing how careless he can be, but it was complete.... The passion and the grief he knew from Caroline and from his feeling for her have made him more like the rest of us.” The irony of this is that at the time he and Hardwick were “back together,” in a sense at least, having found some resolving level of affectionate friendship and companionship after Blackwood dissolved her marriage to Lowell and cast him out. The late equilibrium discovered with Hardwick, a shifting of their long-standing oddity as a couple, despite its long endurance—what he refers to in a letter to Rich “as tho a bear had married a greyhound”—seems in the main to have come out of this late revelation on Lowell’s part that he could be the more loving one, the one responsible and abandoned.

At the time of its publication, Lowell’s friends and family were critical of Ian Hamilton’s biography for its apparent failure to show just why and how Lowell inspired the sort of dutiful affection and devotion it described, despite all of his challenging, selfish, damaging behavior. A similar query must surely hang over the publication of this book: he is so often dismissing, haughty, self-absorbed, and yet Hardwick, most of all, is unwilling to abandon him or to maintain anger or distance for very long. Letters are not life, and just as their daughter Harriet’s concerns over Hardwick’s restoration and achievements being overlooked in favor of some sort of victim narrative color the introduction, so is it too easy and simplistic to figure Lowell as a villainous cad or an uncaring betrayer. One need only read Hardwick’s unforgettable, grief-stricken letters about Lowell (referred to by his lifelong nickname Cal) to McCarthy and Bishop after his death at sixty, to see that mixed in with the anger, hurt, and exasperation was always a rich, resilient seam of love:

When Harriet came up with me [at] the end of May, Cal seemed to be about everywhere: his red shirt and socks were a painful discovery. The death is unacceptable and yet I know he has gone and it is very difficult to bring the two together ever.

When Hardwick wrote of her own experience in Sleepless Nights, begun during the breakdown of the marriage and published in 1979, her way of getting around Lowell’s huge disruptive presence was to all but excise him, an artistic coup, as well as some manner of comeuppance, as McCarthy pointed out to her in the final letter collected here: “He’d be put out somewhat in his vanity to find himself figuring mainly as an absence.” Earlier, in a spirit of presumptive magnanimity, Lowell had written to Hardwick of her novel in progress: “Shall I say you are welcome to anything about me ... What a ludicrous offer (what you have already)[.] I do think you should use anything you can control.” That she chose not to use almost anything of him says enough about their contrasting personalities, and art: his by the end a compost heap of implication and indiscretion; hers one of saying what really happened, but not to whom.