THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 77
have been signed with both our names—
or simply ‘by DJ, as told to JM.’” A n d
yet, Lurie notes disapprovingly, “when
Sandover appeared the following year,
the only name on the title page was
[Merrill’s] own.”
The question of appropriation is the
editorial mainspring of “The Dolphin
Letters.” Saskia Hamilton, who teaches
at Barnard and helped assemble the two
previous volumes of Lowell letters, ap
proaches the particulars here with deep
knowledge and occasionally overexcited
exegesis. When Lowell complains to
Hardwick about taxation (“The gov
ernment scoops us like a steamshovel”),
Hamilton pounces with a footnote re
minding us that “yellow dinosaur steam
shovels” make an appearance in “For
the Union Dead.” When Hardwick
laments that Lowell will “never, never,
never” be home again, we are directed
to her 1964 review of Peter Brook’s
production of “King Lear,” in which
she writes, “All the existential ‘nothings’
and ‘nevers’ of the play take on a spe
cial meaning.”
In 1976, Lowell tells Hardwick she
is “welcome to anything about me” that
she might like to use in her novel in
progress. “Sleepless Nights” ends up
containing very little of Lowell, just a
glance or two at “the Mister,” less vivid
and full than the portrait of the clean
ing lady who calls him that. Once, he
is referred to as “him who has left,” his
absence becoming a kind of presence,
but also, in this partepistolary novel, a
sort of revenge. By 1975, Lowell was
sometimes addressing his letters to
“Elizabeth Hardwick” instead of “Eliz
abeth Lowell.” (“I go back and forth as
a commuter,” Hardwick writes.) The
two seemed to have less and less to say
to each other—“I’d write more but noth
ing churns up,” Hardwick tells him—
and yet their exhausting estrangement
was approaching an unexpected coda.
Lowell’s marriage to Blackwood was
falling apart under the weight of her al
coholism, and her inability to help or
even be near him during his spells of
madness. In “Robert Lowell: Setting
the River on Fire” (2017), Kay Redfield
Jamison quotes the poet Frank Bidart,
who said that Blackwood “was always
a very vivid talker, but she got to be
much more flamboyant, and there was
a kind of vehemence, an apocalyptic,
destructive coloration” to her words—
not the “piercing and thrilling” and ul
timately therapeutic speech Lowell had
always heard from Hardwick. He moved
back to America in 1977 and spent por
tions of the last year of his life with
Hardwick in New York and Maine.
(The poet Philip Booth greeted him as
“Odysseus” when he turned up at his
old haunts.) Jamison sets out believable
evidence of a “growing tenderness” in
Lowell toward the end. Hardwick as
sured McCarthy that their reunifica
tion was “no great renewed romance,
but a kind of friendship” and quiet care
giving: “We are trying to work out a
sort of survival for both of us.”
After a trip to see Blackwood and
his son, Sheridan, in Ireland, Lowell
died of a heart attack, on September 12,
1977, in a taxicab taking him from J.F.K.
to Hardwick’s apartment, on West Sixty
seventh Street—a poignant twist for
the biographers Hardwick had been
dreading for years. She believed that
their effortful “documentation,” as she
scornfully called it, would further dis
tort her history with Lowell, even morethan the usurpation of her letters by his
poetry already had.
In his last book, “Day by Day,” pub
lished just weeks before his death, Low
ell asked, in a poem called “Epilogue,”
“Why not say what happened?”—the
question Hardwick had posed to him,
encouragingly, some twenty years be
fore, as he sought to expand the pos
sibilities of confessional poetry. It is often
quoted as an apologia for that mode,
but in “Epilogue” the question is one
rhetorical piece of the poem’s attempt
to weigh the merits of actuality against
those of art. Longing to create “some
thing imagined, not recalled,” the poet
finds himself “paralyzed by fact,” before
accepting, or at least contemplating, that
we are but “poor passing facts”—and
praying “for the grace of accuracy.” Are
facts dishonored when art distorts them?
Do they point to any larger truth when
biography collects and presents them as
is? If Lowell ever had the answer, it may
have come, improbably enough, in “The
Dolphin,” when he wrote, with a mo
ment’s fleeting certainty, “Everything is
real until it’s published.” “We’re so not getting our security deposit back.”