Carrying on loving: Elizabeth Hardwick’s and Robert Lowell’s remarkable correspondence throughout the 1970s

Since Robert Lowell’s sudden death in 1977 his critical reputation has suffered from the usual post-mortem slump. Interest in Lowell’s life, however, remains as strong as during his celebrity heyday, when he graced the cover of Time magazine and marched on the Pentagon with Norman Mailer. A biography (excellent, by Ian Hamilton), an edition of his letters, and a volume of the correspondence between Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop are all firmly in print. Now we have The Dolphin Letters: 1970–1979, which includes both Lowell’s letters to his wife Elizabeth Hardwick (during and after the dissolution of their marriage) and her letters to him, long thought to have been lost or destroyed.

The disruption at the heart of this collection of correspondence began when Lowell came to England in April 1970, first as a visiting fellow at All Souls, Oxford, then as a don at Essex University. After Hardwick had returned to New York with their daughter, Lowell met Caroline Blackwood at a party and experienced a 50-year-old’s version of a coup de foudre — which was immediately reciprocated. When he refused to return to the States Hardwick at first felt this was simply the latest episode of Lowell’s periodic fits of mania, in which inevitably there figured a young, attractive girl, Lowell’s declared intention to lead a ‘new life’, his increasing mentions of Hitler, then three to four weeks in a psychiatric institution followed by the release of the now-subdued and repentant poet. But this time it was different, not least because of Blackwood’s own gifts as a writer, and because she was not, after marriages to Lucian Freud and the composer Israel Citkowitz, about to be anybody’s casual groupie.

What follows, in Saskia Hamilton’s careful and scholarly edition, is the seven-year sequence of letters between Lowell and Hardwick that resulted from their separation and divorce, interspersed by letters to and from friends — Mary McCarthy and Elizabeth Bishop prominent among them.