A Collection of Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell's Letters Reviewed in the Times

In the New York Times, Parul Sehgal reviews a new collection of Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell's letters, compiled and introduced by Saskia Hamilton, which, in Sehgal's words, "brings to life one of literary history’s most famous scandals." Picking up from there: 

In 1970, the poet Robert Lowell took a teaching appointment at Oxford, leaving behind his wife, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick, and the couple’s 13-year-old daughter, Harriet. At a party that spring, he encountered the heiress and Anglo-Irish writer Caroline Blackwood. He moved into her house that night.

Hardwick had become grudgingly accustomed to this sort of thing; Lowell and his “girls.” He had a way of falling in love especially when on the brink of mania. W. H. Auden once enumerated the warning signs of such episodes: “a) he announces that he is the only living poet b) a romantic and usually platonic attraction to a young girl and c) he gives a huge party.”

Blackwood proved different, however. “I am not mad and hold to you with reason,” Lowell wrote to her in a poem. He intended to stay in England and marry her. Hardwick, furious and bewildered after their two decades of marriage, wrote him a series of desperate letters. If she couldn’t appeal to his sense of loyalty to her, she begged on behalf of their daughter and even American literature. “You are a great American writer. You have told us what we are, like Melville,” she pleaded. “You are not an English writer, but the most American of souls, the most gifted in finding the symbolic meaning of this strange place. You are a loss to our culture, hanging about after squalid spoiled, selfish life.” The letters whiplashed from frenzy to self-abasement and fulsome apology. “Cal, darling: If you need me I’ll always be there, and if you don’t need me I’ll always not be there.”

Read on at the New York Times.