THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 73
truth, which she passes on in a letter to
her close friend Mary McCarthy: “I
knew Cal”—whose nickname derived
from both Caligula and Shakespeare’s
Caliban—“had a girl and had been dis-
tressed for some time, but it was just this
afternoon that I knew it was Caroline.
I felt such relief I burst out laughing! I
called him immediately at her house and
he talked as if he were talking to me
from his studio, for an hour, laughing
and joking and saying you are spending
all your alimony on this call.” Hardwick
insists to McCarthy that she “cannot
take [Caroline] seriously for Cal.” That
her displacer should be the titled, unfo-
cussed Blackwood—the ex-wife of the
painter Lucian Freud, the estranged
spouse of the composer Israel Citko-
witz, and the former lover of Robert Sil-
vers, the editor of The New York Review
of Books—lends, for Hardwick, a “comic
element” to the whole matter. She con-
cedes that Lowell’s affair may be more
serious than the infatuations that often
accompanied his breakdowns, but she is
certain that it “will not last,” even if it
destroys her own marriage.
A years-long epistolary drama lay
ahead. Lowell would graft parts of it
onto “The Dolphin,” a sonnet sequence
that he published in 1973, chronicling
the unresolved tumult of his relations
with Hardwick and Blackwood. Para-
phrased and versified, some of Hardwick’s
letters, along with her spoken words
from that supposedly merry phone call
of June 25, 1970, would find their way
into the book, without her permission.
The ensuing scandal is by now firmly
part of American literary history, fleshed
out by various Lowell biographies and
studies; by the publication of his let-
ters, in 2005; and by the appearance, in
2008, of his correspondence with Eliz-
abeth Bishop, who, with blunt elo-
quence, tried to dissuade him from the
appropriation of his wife’s words. “Art
just isn’t worth that much,” Bishop wrote,
in uncharacteristic italics, after reading
drafts of the poems.
But “The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979”
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux), edited by
Saskia Hamilton and published this
month, will be the essential volume for
any understanding of what actually went
on. A sort of casebook, it assembles ma-
terial from all the participants in the tur-
moil, including Elizabeth Hardwick,
whose letters from this period appear in
full for the first time. With “Lizzie” as
its principal author, “The Dolphin Let-
ters” turns out to be a better and a more
important book than “The Dolphin.”T
he assembled correspondence takes
readers through the birth of Low-
ell and Blackwood’s son, Sheridan;
Lowell and Hardwick’s divorce, in Oc-
tober, 1972; his immediate remarriage;
Hardwick’s continuing claims of his in-
attentiveness toward Harriet; and the
crisis brought on by the publication of
“The Dolphin.” Hardwick’s alterna-
tions of mood, between forbearance
and anger, are not the manic kind that
Lowell suffered. They reflect a fluctu-
ating, improvised rebuilding, more
suited to prose than to self-mytholo-
gizing poetry. She conveys to Lowell
her “contempt for your present situa-
tion” as well as “love for you.” When she
signs off as “Your loving wife,” the envoi
is simultaneously sarcastic and true.
There are times when she appears
overly grateful for crumbs of recogni-
tion—“your kind note to me meant a
lot, more than a lot”—and needlessly
(if cuttingly) generous toward Black-
wood, whom she writes directly with
regard to Harriet. Her daughter, she ex-
plains, “does not imagine very much of
Cal but I feel that I must make definite
arrangements for at least a few days with
him each year and I hope you won’t
mind these brief and rare occasions.” In
the first months after the marriage’s col-
lapse, Hardwick muses, tentatively, to
Mary McCarthy, upon “that strange
thing that happens to you when you
know you don’t want it any longer.” But
her emotional liberation is fragile and
intermittent. More than a year after
writing this to McCarthy, she tells Low-
ell, “I miss you terribly and always will
until I die,” and well after that she is
still seeing to his literary business and
issuing commands that hover tenderly
between the wifely and the maternal:
“Keep your pills straight and all will be
well.” A pledge she makes early in their
estrangement remains in force through-
out: “If you need me I’ll always be there,
and if you don’t need me I’ll always not
be there.”
Lowell acknowledges her “old unde-
viating loyalty” and heroism, and it is
Hardwick’s own awareness of thosequalities that launches and validates
her anger, forcing into the letters the
sort of speech Lowell paid tribute to in
“Man and Wife” (“the shrill verve/of
your invective ... your old-fashioned ti-
rade—/loving, rapid, merciless”). Hard-
wick tells him, during their first sum-
mer of separation, that “the choice you
have made is ludicrous and destructive
and unreal,” and she stingingly contrasts
the existence he’ll have with Blackwood
to the one he could have with her:
What are your values? Do they include loy-
alty, responsibility to those you love, since you
have love for me. Sickness & shame will over-
come you as your whole life sinks into that cre-
ated by someone else, ruled by a new country
& the English aristocracy & its helpless ways,
by surrender of something beautifully old-fash-
ioned & New England & pure in you.However earned and rational, Hard-
wick’s eruptions of wrath are quickly
spent and regretted. She could never
bring herself to like Lowell’s former
student Sylvia Plath (“What an awful
girl! What rage and hatred”), and usu-
ally appears relieved when affectionate
recollection diminishes her own feroc-
ity. During a summer alone in Maine,
she pierces Lowell with a dart of par-
allel phrasing—“no child you can pro-
duce can be more splendid than the one
you abandoned”—ten days before send-
ing “fond memories” of his “old grey
head going down Water Street! The
swallows miss you.”
Lowell’s conduct in every part of the
story, not just his eventual abuse of Hard-
wick’s letters, seems worse in this “Rash-
omon”-like volume than it has in pre-
vious tellings. His guilt comes up in
sodden flashes (“Two additional lives
would be too little to cleanse my char-
acter, to go the rounds of amends”), but
more often a clueless, offhand cruelty
prevails. He wonders, to his friend Blair
Clark, if it isn’t “meaninglessly scrupu-
lous” to fret over bringing Blackwood
to New York while Hardwick is there,
and to Hardwick herself he exhibits a
thinking-out-loud callousness. “I don’t
think I can go back to you,” he writes
on October 18, 1970. Three weeks later,
he asks, “Dearest Lizzie: I wonder if we
couldn’t make it up?”
In a letter of her own to Clark, Hard-
wick recognizes Lowell’s narcissism:
“In all the months he has been gone
I’ve heard from him a lot and he has