72 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
Lowell mined years of epistolary drama with his wife for “The Dolphin.”
BOOKS
WORD FOR WORD
Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and the ethics of turning life into art.
BY THOMAS MALLON
“
H
ow happy we’ll be together,”
Robert Lowell wrote to Eliza-
beth Hardwick in July, 1949, weeks be-
fore their marriage. Thirty-two years
old and divorced from the writer Jean
Stafford, Lowell was finishing a stay at
Baldpate Hospital, in Massachusetts,
after his first serious mental breakdown.
But he hopefully prophesied that he and
Hardwick, whose romance had begun
at Yaddo, the artists’ colony, would soon
be “together writing the world’s master-
pieces, swimming and washing dishes.”
Lowell’s bouts of mania periodically
interrupted the literary and domestic
success that the two of them managed
to create during the next two decades.
The cozily titled poem “Man and Wife,”
in his landmark confessional volume
“Life Studies” (1959), describes the times
that Hardwick
faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive.
In the spring of 1970, not long after
their twentieth anniversary, the Low-
ells vacationed in Italy with their only
child, Harriet, then thirteen. After his
wife and daughter returned home to
New York, Lowell went by himself to
Oxford, in order to take up a fellow-
ship at All Souls College. He also took
up, almost immediately, with Lady Car-
oline Blackwood, who soon enough be-
came the third writer he married.
Lowell’s desertion of Hardwick was
for a while masked by his deceptions,
and by the simple bewilderment engen-
dered, in those days, by transatlantic let-
ters crossing in the mail. Early in May,
Hardwick writes, “Darling, I’m so happy
you’re having such a nice time,” and
apologizes for the quotidian dullness
back home: “all these book-keeping and
housekeeping and child-raising details”
that she includes, as she continues to
get “the taxes, insurances, houses, stu-
dies, papers, schools organized, mail an-
swered.” Within weeks, however, she
has become exasperated with the infre-
quency of Lowell’s communications (“I
guess we’ll never hear from you”), tell-
ing him it “would be decent” if he at
least kept in touch with his daughter.
But, even before Lowell counter-com-
plains about “such boiling messages, all
as public as possible on cables and un-
inclosed postcards,” Hardwick retreats
toward contrition: “Darling I didn’t know
you were in London working on the
galleys of your wonderful book.... Sorry
I complained about your not writing.”
What she still doesn’t know is that
he has been working on those proofs
with Blackwood, a thirty-eight-year-
old heir to the Guinness brewing for-
tune and a writer of social criticism for
English magazines. When Lowell ca-
bles that unspecified “personal difficul-
ties” will keep him from making a prom-
ised visit, late in June, to New York,
Hardwick responds, “I must say I feel
rather like a widow.” To a reader, she
appears more like a secretary or a lit-
erary agent:
I sit here answering your mail, saying “my
husband is away and will be so indefinitely. I
do not think he would like to write on his con-
cept of style, since this isn’t exactly what he
likes to do, but I will send along your kind let-
ter.” And so it goes. Anthologies pile up, tele-
phones ring.
She wonders about next year—“if you
are leaving us or if I am leaving you”—
and sends off a letter, on June 23rd, “with
my love if you want it.” During the next
couple of days, while Lowell’s publisher
tries to track him down, Hardwick’s
pleading breaks through attempts to
remain calm: “Don’t forget us! There
was a life here and there still is.”
On June 25th, Hardwick learns the FRED W. MCDARRAH/GETTY
