The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979

October 1, 2019
A peculiarly fascinating volume containing hundreds of letters between poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977) and his estranged wife, novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick (1915-2007). Beginning in 1970, Lowell was living in England, where he met and later married his third wife, Caroline Blackwood. Hardwick was living in New York with their teenage daughter, Harriet, during the school year and on the coast of Maine during the summer. This is a long, lush, and impeccably footnoted volume, and yet some of the most intriguing action happens between the lines. Poet Hamilton (English/Barnard Coll.; Corridor, 2014, etc.), who also edited The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005), sets up the book with a well-informed section of biographical context and a chronology covering both the two writers and the broader political arena. As a result, before the exchange of letters begins, readers knows what Hardwick doesn't: that Lowell, playfully depicting his time in England and dithering about when he will return to the States, is already deep in a relationship with Blackwood. This quality gives the letters the sometimes-voyeuristic thrill of watching a slow motion train wreck. As Hardwick gains awareness, the dynamic between the two becomes apparent: Hardwick, forced to be the practical one, dealt with Harriet's daily life and begged Lowell to pay his taxes while Lowell, frequently hospitalized for bipolar disorder, wrote whimsical letters to Harriet and focused on his own internal feelings. All the while, they exchanged their thoughts about their work and their reading. In addition to the marital betrayal, the volume covers another, more insidious one: Lowell, writing the confessional volume of poetry called The Dolphin, appropriated and changed lines from Hardwick's letters to create a series of poems about his estrangement from her and love for Blackwood. The book includes not just Hardwick's shocked responses to the poems, but also the more outraged reactions of poets Adrienne Rich, who broke off her friendship with Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop, who famously told Lowell that "art just isn't worth that much." A devastating examination of the limits of the written word.

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Starred review from October 21, 2019
The push and pull of love and anger course through this riveting collection of correspondence between onetime literary power couple Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Beginning soon after Lowell’s move to England, without Hardwick, to teach, the book then tracks her discovery of his infidelity, their 1972 divorce, and his 1973 publication of The Dolphin, a sonnet sequence drawing extensively on her letters to him. It then covers the aftermath, which saw Hardwick deeply hurt, and their friends (including Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, and Adrienne Rich) rallying around her. Though Lowell is perhaps better known, Hardwick emerges as the collection’s central figure. Her voice resonates more deeply, with frustrated but loving concern for Lowell—who struggled with manic-depressive disorder—and with protectiveness toward their daughter, Harriet. Despite such pressures, Hardwick also, as Harriet noted, “was never freer or more lively” than after the divorce, when she was able to focus on her own creativity rather than on her feckless husband. Bolstered by a helpful introduction and timeline by poet and Barnard professor Hamilton (Corridor), this compulsively readable collection illuminates a tumultuous time in two celebrated writers’ lives.

February 7, 2020

In the spring of 1970, shortly after Lowell and Hardwick's 20th wedding anniversary, Lowell, in Oxford on a scholarship, moved in with writer and muse Lady Caroline Blackwood, former wife of painter Lucian Freud. A distraught Hardwick disclosed her anger, humiliation, and depression in a series of letters to Lowell from 1970 to 1973. Without Hardwick's knowledge or approval, Lowell quoted, paraphrased, and emended the letters, incorporating them in the sonnet sequence, The Dolphin (1973). Anguished at the betrayal of her privacy, Hardwick tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to retrieve the letters. She passed away in 2007 believing they were either lost or destroyed. Unpredictably, Blackwood, through an intermediary, had deposited the letters at Harvard's Houghton Library on condition they be released after Hardwick's death. The correspondence is published here for the first time with letters, extending to 1979, to Lowell and Hardwick's daughter Harriet and close friends Mary McCarthy, Elisabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich. VERDICT Replete with editor Hamilton's masterly and well-researched footnotes, this will be an indispensable gloss to the reading and interpretation of The Dolphin.--Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal

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Starred review from November 1, 2019
Literary letter collections reveal the predicaments, relationships, struggles, and forces that shape writers' lives and work. Letters are vehicles for confession and analysis, laments and gossip, and grappling with everyday troubles, love, and heartbreak. Letters serve as rehearsal spaces and laboratories. For the mighty writers of the typewriter age showcased in this trio of commanding and revelatory epistolary volumes, the effort to get it right, true, and powerful is sacrosanct.The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 is a literary drama of fierce intensity. Poet Robert Lowell and critic and writer Elizabeth Hardwick were married for 21 years?during which she held fast during his bouts with bipolar disorder?and had a daughter on the brink of adolescence when he went to England, leaving Hardwick nearly destitute, and fell in love with socialite and writer Caroline Blackwell. Lowell and Hardwick conducted anguished epistolary negotiations, the gravity of which drew in concerned friends, including Elizabeth Bishop, Frank Bidart, and Mary McCarthy. Hardwick is elegantly exacting even as the situation worsens and she pounds out letters of fury and resolve. Lowell's responses are apologetic and dogged. Gradually, Hardwick makes peace with the new order, until Lowell's The Dolphin is published, a collection in which he quotes from her letters. With graceful authority, poet and editor Saskia Hamilton defines the emotional and literary issues raised by this controversial Pulitzer Prize-winning book, reissued to reveal Lowell's revisions as The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972-1973 in conjunction with these ensnaring and affecting transatlantic letters between two poets who, in spite of epic hurt, never ceased loving each other.Flannery O'Connor's posthumous letter collection, The Habit of Being (1979), has been cherished by booklovers and would-be writers. Now Good Things Out of Nazareth presents a whole new perspective on this audacious, compassionate, piercing young writer out of Georgia, coping with a disease that severely restricted and shortened her life, yet who lived vibrantly on the page with cosmic humor and compassion. These letters by O'Connor and her circle bring to light the impact her genius had on other writers, including Paul Engle, then director of the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop; Walker Percy, and critic and writer Caroline Gordon. A devout, wryly witty Catholic, O'Connor confides to Gordon, a convert, that she has been examining her conscience on the business of writing about freaks. O'Connor acknowledges her rootedness in Dante as the collection's editor, Benjamin Alexander, puts it, and describes her adventures raising peacocks, her response to reading Henry James, her thoughts on prayer, and how crucial letters are as her illness isolates her. This edifying and entertaining gathering offers a new portal onto a playful, spiritual, courageous, and indelible American master.Invisible Man is a masterpiece of blazing dissent, and the only novel Ralph Ellison completed, though he worked on another for decades. With his persistent writer's block surrounding him like a dark halo, the enormity of The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison is startling, and so vivid, muscular, frank, lengthy, and involving are his missives, it's clear that writing was his sustenance. He began corresponding as soon as he left Oklahoma City, to pursue music at Tuskegee Institute. When he arrived in New York, fate and Richard Wright steered him to his true destiny. Ellison's letters to family, friends (especially Albert Murray and Saul Bellow), colleagues, agents, editors, and fans have the agility, wit, and spectrum of moods, tones, and pace found in jazz, which...