THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 75
most real thing.” In Lowell’s “Green
Sore,” we get instead:
She knows she will seldom see him;
the physical presence or absence is the thing.He has deleted any explanation of whom
he belongs to, and made the mere fact
of his existence (“presence” or “absence”),
not his location (“there” or “here”), all
that seems to matter. It is no longer “the
most real thing”—one concern among
many—but simply “the thing,” ineffable
and all-consuming. These changes al-
chemize a small piece of gold into a
small piece of lead. Lowell slackens
Hardwick’s prose into poetry, robs it of
precision and pith. Shortly after the
book’s publication, Hardwick manages
to use her formidable powers of critical
detachment in assessing, to Bishop, the
poems’ literary flaws: “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.”
In March, 1972, Lowell himself had
written to Bishop that “The Dolphin”
would be best read alongside two other
books: “History,” a revised version of a
collection called “Notebook,” and a slim
volume of poems, “For Lizzie and Har-
riet.” All three were published together
in 1973.“The three books are one heap,
one binding, so to speak, though not
one book,” Lowell told Bishop. More
crucial than this recommendation of a
contextual reading is the way the son-
nets of “The Dolphin” have always re-
quired, for any meaningful clarity, some
knowledge of what was going on in the
actual lives of Lowell and Hardwick
and Blackwood. The book still needs
what Harriet, as a child, called “foot-
marks”—not to present incidentally in-
teresting facts but, rather, to provide a
basic intelligibility. The letters and bits
of conversation in the poems seem to
come out of nowhere, not so much rich
with discoverable meaning as simply
confusing. Lowell may well have had
in mind George Meredith’s “Modern
Love” (1862), another verse narrative of
marital catastrophe, whose sixteen-line
sonnets have the poet speaking as both
cuckold and adulterer, with anger and
self-laceration and bitter amusement.
But the male voice in “Modern Love”
BRIEFLY NOTED
The Cheffe, by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by
Jordan Stump (Knopf ). At the heart of this novel is a charac-
ter study of a brilliant chef, filtered through the perception
of her most obsessive disciple, a much younger man to whom
she is fairy godmother, mother, and beloved. His attraction
propels a spiralling family psychodrama, whose richness and
suspense are surpassed by those of scenes depicting the chef ’s
exquisite inventions, from a signature “green-robed leg of
lamb” to sweet crabmeat poached in absinthe. NDiaye cre-
ates an arresting portrait of a self-effacing genius, as the chef
yearns “to leave only a vague, marveling recollection in the
eaters’ minds ... only a dish, or just its name, or its scent, or
three bold, forthright colors on a milky white plate.”Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen, by Dexter Palmer (Pantheon).
In a small English village at the dawn of the Age of Enlight-
enment, a woman named Mary Toft gives birth to a dismem-
bered rabbit every few days. Whether her plight is a medi-
cal miracle, an elaborate hoax, or a “shared moment of
collective delusion” is the conundrum of this frolicsome pe-
riod comedy. The young surgeon who cares for Toft becomes
renowned as an “expert in human-leporine midwifing,” and,
when word of Toft reaches King George’s court, she is sum-
moned with the surgeon and his apprentice to London, where
they become entwined in the bizarre and barbarous world of
the upper class—a visit that exposes the chasm between pro-
vincial innocence and metropolitan cunning.Parisian Lives, by Deirdre Bair (Nan A. Talese). The author of
this sparkling memoir achieved two of the greatest coups in
literary biography: writing a semi-authorized life of Samuel
Beckett, which the gnomic Irishman promised to “neither
help nor hinder,” and a life of Simone de Beauvoir, which
was based on interviews conducted immediately before the
philosopher’s death. Bair spent seven years on Beckett and
ten on Beauvoir, and her dedication to her subjects is appar-
ent. Into her accounts of working with these eminent, often
exasperating writers she weaves recollections of malfunction-
ing tape recorders, grandstanding sources, and her travails as
a professional and a mother commuting across the Atlantic,
working in a field dominated by men.Medieval Bodies, by Jack Hartnell (Norton). Elegantly combin-
ing strands from the histories of medicine, art, and religion,
this study explores how the medieval world understood and
treated the human body. In the late Middle Ages, medicine
sought natural as well as mystical causes for all manner of
afflictions, making diagnosis a complex affair (stringy hair, for
instance, might indicate an unscrupulous character, while bald-
ness resulted from an excess of heat). Focussing on Byzantium,
the Islamic world, and the patchwork of kingdoms constitut-
ing western and central Europe, Hartnell deftly shows how
these societies’ visual cultures were, like their medical theories,
profoundly influenced by a symbolic understanding of human-
ity’s relationship to realms seen and unseen.