On Robert Lowell's Burdening of Elizabeth Hardwick

In the new issue of NYRB, Langdon Hammer considers two books centered around Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, both edited by Saskia Hamilton: The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle; and The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972–1973 (both, FSG). "By July 1972, with the sale of the archive to Harvard moving forward," writes Hammer, "[Elizabeth] Hardwick had to face the galling fact that she had arranged it on behalf of a man who was not only divorcing her but writing a book about making up his mind to do so." More:

...Moreover, she told Lowell, the archive contained “everything of my own except your letters to me.” Included were eighty letters from Hardwick, and 168 addressed to her individually, among much else that concerned her. “I should have had my own arrangement with Harvard,” she realized, but “I just wasn’t able to take a stand on my rights and was a bit too sentimental I fear….”

A letter passes between people, like a gift. To whom does it—to whom should it—belong, the letter-writer or the addressee? Who decides what can be done with it? As Lowell circulated a draft of The Dolphin among friends, these questions pressed forward. Stanley Kunitz told Lowell he found some passages almost “too ugly” to read “for being too cruel, too intimately cruel.” Elizabeth Bishop scolded Lowell in caps and italics: “One can use one’s life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren’t you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn’t changed them…etc. But art just isn’t worth that much.”

When the book was published in 1973, Hardwick was badly wounded. She wrote an angry, vaguely threatening letter to Robert Giroux, Lowell’s publisher. She told Bishop that The Dolphin and its reviews have “hurt me as much as anything in my life.” “I am near breakdown,” she wrote to Lowell, “and also paranoid and frightened about what you may next have in store, such as madly using this letter.”

The Hardwick letters that Lowell drew on in The Dolphin were not part of the Harvard sale. Hardwick told Lowell she wanted at least “to see those letters you say are mine. And that you put in my voice. Because I can’t remember and just want to see how they went.” But Lowell never returned the letters or showed copies to her. For a long time, it seemed they were lost. Hardwick, who died in 2007, supposed that Blackwood had destroyed them after Lowell’s death in 1977.

In fact, Blackwood had saved them...

Read on at NYRB.