76 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
is forceful and direct, less like Lowell’s
than like Hardwick’s.
As in the letters, Lowell’s guilt makes
fitful appearances in his poems:
I waste hours writing in and writing out a
line,
as if listening to conscience were telling
the truth.Yet a kind of self-aggrandizement just
as often rules the page. The testimony
to his own desirability comes via Hard-
wick’s versified letters or telephone talk:
... I was playing records on Sunday,
arranging all my records, and I came
on some of your voice, and started to suggest
that Harriet listen: then immediately
we both shook our heads. It was like hearing
the voice of the beloved who had died.In “Christmas,” the poet extolls, and at-
tempts to repel, his ex-wife’s words:
All too often now your voice is too bright;
I always hear you ... commonsense, though
verbal ...
waking me to myself: truth, the truth ...Hardwick’s clarity, even doctored, carries
more energy than the elliptical maunder-
ings of the sonnets from which she is
largely or entirely absent. In “On the
End of the Phone,” the poet seems to
concede as much, contrasting her “ra-
pier voice ... hundred words a minute,
piercing and thrilling” with his own
“sidestepping and obliquities.”
Lowell knows that what he’s doing
with the letters is wrong. “Lizzie is the
heroine,” he writes to Stanley Kunitz
of his work in progress, on April 25,
1971, “but she will feel bruised by the
intimacy.” To Hardwick herself, prior
to publication, he offers false assurances:
“You won’t feel betrayed or exploited.”
When she at last reads the book, and
its reviews, she even has to fear the in-
strument she uses to transmit her fury:
I feel that our marriage has been a com-
plete mistake from the beginning. We have
now gone down in history as a horridly angry
and hateful couple. A review is coming out in
which Harriet is called “the fictional Terrible
Child.” ... She knows nothing of all this. I am
near breakdown and also paranoid and fright-
ened about what you may next have in store,
such as madly using this letter.
After dedicating “The Dolphin” to
Blackwood, Lowell insists, to Hardwick,
“I swear I never in all this business have
wanted to hurt you.” Three years later,
when his “Selected Poems” is issued, he
tells her, “I regret the Letters in Dol-
phin.” But, he explains, “the only way
to make a narrative was to leave a few.”L
owell had always been something
of a magpie, an allusive poet keen
on incorporating the voices of literary
predecessors and contemporaries as
well as the utterances of family and
friends. Writing, in 1949, to T. S. Eliot,
then an editor at Faber, about a Brit-
ish edition of his early work, he ex-
plains, “When I use the word after below
the title of a poem, what follows is not
a translation but an imitation.” In 1970,
in “Notebook,” he quoted conversations
he’d had with Eliot and William Car-
los Williams, along with newly me-
tered versions of letters from Bishop
and Allen Tate.
The appropriations in “The Dol-
phin,” however, are breathtakingly more
intimate. When Hardwick saw the book,
she wrote in protest to its publisher,
Robert Giroux, “I know of no other in-
stance in literature where a person is ex-
ploited in a supposedly creative act, under
his own name, in his own lifetime.” One
would not, of course, have four centu-
ries’ worth of novels without the forced
deflection of real people—their physi-
cal appearance, actions, and speech—
into “characters.” Composites are rarer
than straight knockoffs, and creations
ex nihilo are rarer still. (For an amusing
catalogue of fiction’s human resources,
see William Amos’s “The Originals:
Who’s Really Who in Fic-
tion.”) And yet, even in the
most treacherous romans à
clef, actual models are usu-
ally accorded the fig-leaf
dignity of invented names, and the writ-
er’s annexations don’t generally extend
to a real person’s written words.
But standards, amid great conten-
tion, seem to be changing. Sheila Heti’s
novel “How Should a Person Be?” (2012)
annoyed some readers by crossing the
farthest boundaries of autofiction, using
e-mails and transcribed conversations
with friends, who went into the book
without pseudonyms. The Swedish au-
thor Linda Boström Knausgård, whose
novel “Welcome to America” was re-
cently translated into English, has upto now been best known to readers as
the wife whose actual life and mental
breakdown are unsparingly portrayed
in “My Struggle,” her ex-husband’s na-
noscale chronicle novel. Elsewhere in
Scandinavia, dispute continues over
whether the Norwegian writer Vigdis
Hjorth used family members’ correspon-
dence, without their permission, in her
novel “Will and Testament.”
In “Seduction and Betrayal,” Hard-
wick takes up the case of William Words-
worth’s sister, Dorothy, whose journals
were “created in a collaborating mood”
for her brother’s poetic use. Hardwick is
wary of overestimating Dorothy’s con-
tribution—“the correspondences noted
by scholars are not very striking”—but
does concede it a place “alongside,” if not
fully entwined with, William’s poems.
Phyllis Rose, the literary critic and bi-
ographer, suggests a similarly cautious
appraisal of the photographs that Alfred
Stieglitz took of Georgia O’Keeffe: “It
is modish now to say that O’Keeffe ‘col-
laborated’ in the portraits and to present
them as a joint work. As years went by
and O’Keeffe took charge of her own
image, this became true to some extent.
But in the early images, from 1918 to
1920, the collaboration amounted to little
more than her willingness to be a model.”
“Willingness”—eagerly imparted by
Dorothy Wordsworth, absent from Eliz-
abeth Hardwick in “The Dolphin”—is
the ethical crux of any double-helix cre-
ation. A decades-long joint enterprise
of James Merrill and his lover David
Jackson, their hands sliding over the
same Ouija board, resulted in three vol-
umes of poetry, eventually
collected as “The Chang-
ing Light at Sandover”
(1982). In “Familiar Spirits”
(2001), the novelist Alison
Lurie, a friend of both men, amplified
Jackson’s occasional ambivalence toward
the project into outright censure of Mer-
rill, and of the work’s enthusiasts:It is no wonder that David felt both ex-
haustion and regret. For over twenty years he
had provided at least half of the material for
Jimmy’s epic poem. With the skill of a novel-
ist he had helped to create dozens of original
characters, an elaborate plot, and a fantastic
history and cosmology.Merrill, during an interview in 1981,
considered whether “the trilogy shouldn’t