The recently published The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979, those between writer Elizabeth Hardwick and her husband (then ex) poet Robert Lowell, and the small circle of intimates who were both their confidantes, close readers, and advisors (Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, their publishers) are both profoundly moving and tragic and also uplifting in the way that only letters between such intelligent and self-aware people can be. Writer’s letters often function as alt-diaries, a way of learning what one thinks, but they also are uncommonly detailed and paint a portrait of a world less and less accessible in the age of internet.

Lowell and Hardwick were fine in between the many bouts of mania that hospitalized the poet over the years; the marriage of the southerner to the Boston Brahmin (though here revealed to have Jewish ancestors) was considered one of the pillars of the then very competitive, upper tier world of New York writers. Their daughter Harriet, at first depicted by Hardwick as pre-teen-y and difficult then comes into her own as she grows up in the shadow of Lowell’s coup de foudre—and subsequent marriage-- to Caroline Blackwood, a British beauty, heiress and writer who had already made other talented men (e.g.Lucian Freud, Bob Silvers) lose their heads. (See my recent post on the recent biography of Freud).

As the knowledge of the affair begun in England during a professorship Lowell takes, comes belatedly to Hardwick, she is devastated and lost. She writes to him, trying to hold onto him at first, and then slowly understanding the fullness of his attachment to this other compelling woman. We see her suffer deeply for a couple of years, and then gradually find her footing as an independent woman whose work—and daughter-- literally saves her life. Lowell reveals less as he keeps the details of his life with Blackwood from her for as long as he can but he is also stricken with guilt and confusion. Alongside the emotion are countless letters from Hardwick trying to grapple alone with their taxes and expenses and which takes over her life for extended periods. Friends McCarthy and Bishop—who are also close to Lowell--can only do so much to assuage her anguish.

Compounding the torture is Lowell’s appropriation into his work, in particular his poem The Dolphin, of intimate details he culls directly from her letters. This fact is kept from her until it’s too late and the volume is published. The whole matter of how much writers are ‘allowed’ to capture from real life (this conversation generally around memoir today) is here fully fleshed out.

It brings round the subject of why publish these letters after all? Both Harriet Lowell and Blackwood’s children cooperated with this explosive volume—some would argue that sleeping dogs, children, wives and ex-wives should lie. For my part, I felt complicit at times in invading an intimacy to which I was not party, and yet anyone who has ever been rejected in love (and who hasn’t?) will feel a kinship with these two giants of literature who in the end had to sort through life as the rest of us must.