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- Reading The Dolphin Letters: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and their Circle—interesting and exasperating in equal measure, about 50 pages into it. Poor Elizabeth H., whose task with Lowell was the ongoing equivalent of turning a battleship around in a bathtub. The revered poet of Life Studies and Imitations, and by all accounts a wonderful man when he was sane, but what a job of work.
- Almost halfway through The Dolphin Letters—surely one of the great books, and Elizabeth Hardwick is the center, getting her feet and soon doing her best writing, Seduction and Betrayal and the essays—and poor Lowell, staggering through a midlife crisis in which he loses his footing. It’s the women who tell him—not his men friends, but Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Mary McCarthy and Hardwick most of all. It’s often hard to read. Caroline Blackwood, the beautiful literary aristocrat, fragile and soon down herself, with a household of kids.
- Bipolar, greatly gifted, much enabled: Lowell is often here in cavalier obliviousness, albeit routinely apologetic. It occurs to me that these writers—the women pillars of strength—are less engaged in the larger art scene than might be assumed. Do any of them listen to jazz, for instance? It’s a long book that has been widely but somewhat obtusely reviewed—everybody tiptoeing around Lowell—and still amounts to an exceptional literary-social tapestry.
- It ends with Lowell’s death at 60 of congestive heart failure in a taxi returning to his erstwhile home with Hardwick, after a visit with his wife and young son in Ireland, the new marriage virtually over. What caps and crowns it are the moving final exchanges between the now divorced couple stripped of all but the abiding pleasure of their companionship. It’s Hardwick’s book, with her steadfast love for Lowell, despite all. People won’t be writing these kinds of letters any more and we’re lucky to have this beautifully edited and annotated—the footnotes on each page as good as the main text—epistolary epic.