never answered one question that I
have put to him, or discussed really
anything, me or Harriet or practical
things or Caroline—except himself.”
Lowell manages, amid all the upheaval,
to produce a great deal of poetry, and
at one point he suggests that Hardwick
write and publish something about him,
since that is “one [of ] the things you
do best.” A reader has to wonder if he
isn’t subconsciously urging Hardwick
toward a preëmptive strike against her
own appearances in “The Dolphin.”
More exasperating than his self-preoc-
cupation is the childish malingering
over the many tasks of breaking up—
the taxes to be disentangled, the prop-
erty to be settled. “I’ve spent the fore-
part of this afternoon looking for the
divorce agreement,” he tells Hardwick,
“and fail to find it though once there
seemed to be three or four, various ver-
sions, in drawers.” When he asks his
daughter to “give all my love to mother
and to your self,” he includes a caveat:
“Alas, we can never give all. I try.”
Hardwick declares to him that Har-
riet is now the source of what “real love”
her life contains. Inevitably, the child
becomes a bone of contention, and the
attention to logistics—how the “youth
fares” of the era will take Harriet, a sort
of human parcel, back and forth across
the Atlantic—consume the most weary-
ing stretches of the letters. Between
surges of befuddled warmth, Lowell
treats his daughter, according to Hard-
wick, “like a cottage that once was near
but has been lost to memory when a
new building went up.” He complains
to Elizabeth Bishop that “Harriet has
been stolen from me” in the divorce set-
tlement, as if his own initial desertion
didn’t enter into things.
“We are broke,” Hardwick informs
Lowell early on. Having planned to join
him in England later in 1970, she had
given up her teaching job at Barnard
for the coming academic year. Now she
can’t get it back: “Crummy, cruel thing
for you two selfish little people there
to do.” What she cannot know is that
financial pressures will begin driving
her toward a greater, more focussed
fulfillment of her talents. “I have been
doing all this writing day and night to
make a living,” she reports in March,
1971, having already confessed to Low-
ell that she is hoping “for a little pres-
tige at least.”
As the decade goes on, the exigen-
cies of earning will help to produce a
collection of essays of feminist literary
criticism, “Seduction and Betrayal” (1974),
as well as her best-known novel, “Sleep-
less Nights” (1979), a book, she tells Low-ell, that “will save my life.” Among the
essays is a study of Jane Welsh’s mar-
riage to Thomas Carlyle, which foun-
dered upon the historian’s fascination
with a wealthy aristocrat: Welsh “had
sacrificed something—it was not alto-
gether clear—in vain for Carlyle, and
that discovery, if such it was, accounted
for her exaggerated frenzy over Lady
Ashburton.” It’s hard to imagine that
Hardwick wasn’t writing, in part, about
her own predicament.
She and Lowell had issues over per-
sonal letters even before “The Dolphin.”
In April of 1970, just prior to their part-
ing, Hardwick urged the sale of his pa-
pers to a university as a way for them
to get out from under financial burdens.
She joked about how to increase the
letters’ value (“I have to write some good
ones for the ‘files’!”) and subsequently
took pride in her negotiations with Har-
vard, which acquired them. Lowell had
been queasy about such an archive (“I
hate the idea of people pawing through
it”), and their estrangement complicated
the sale. Hardwick now wanted to be
paid separately for the part of the col-
lection she had generated. Lowell, who
feared the loss of her letters (“Please
don’t wish to erase our long dear years
from the blackboard”), found the con-
dition reasonable, and agreed to it.W
hat became the “Dolphin” scan-
dal involved not the physical or
even the intellectual property of the
Hardwick letters that Lowell incorpo-
rated into his poems. It centered on the
more fraught matter of what might be
called emotional property—Hardwick’s
rights to her own privacy and pain,
claims to be adjudicated not by a court
but by friends, critics, and posterity. In
November, 1970, Lowell writes to Blair
Clark of the “delicate misery” in Hard-
wick’s letters, which “veer from frantic
affection to frantic abuse.” Their po-
tential as literary material seems already
to compel him. But his use of them in
“The Dolphin” fails not just morally
but aesthetically as well. A letter Hard-
wick wrote to Blackwood about ar-
rangements for Harriet, on March 12,
1971, contains this sentence: “She knows
that she will have very little of him from
now on and that he belongs to you and
all of your children, since his physical
presence there and absence here is the“Sure, he’s ascended to a godlike state. But, from what I hear,
he’s still on his family’s cell-phone plan.”