. indeed. hundred words a minute, piercing and thrilling” with his own “sidestepping and obliquities.”. in particular, and with women more generally. Dolphin he did not seem to feel particularly bad about it. At the end of it, almost on a whim, your coffee without really doing it. I have known a mother to work years in this way for her boy. her advice, actually alter the poems. After the ceremony, the newlyweds were given their first few moments together as a couple. makes it kinder to her.” Lowell continued, “It’s oddly enough a technical Before the figurative banns were More than a year after writing this to McCarthy, she tells Lowell, “I miss you terribly and always will until I die,” and well after that she is still seeing to his literary business and issuing commands that hover tenderly between the wifely and the maternal: “Keep your pills straight and all will be well.” A pledge she makes early in their estrangement remains in force throughout: “If you need me I’ll always be there, and if you don’t need me I’ll always not be there.”. point. He was, much of the time, really listening to them. Five “corporations” were started, and the cotton mills belonging to them were building. searingly of it in the American Poetry Review: What does one say about a poet who, having left his wife and Three weeks later, he asks, “Dearest Lizzie: I wonder if we couldn’t make it up?”, In a letter of her own to Clark, Hardwick recognizes Lowell’s narcissism: “In all the months he has been gone I’ve heard from him a lot and he has never answered one question that I have put to him, or discussed really anything, me or Harriet or practical things or Caroline—except himself.” Lowell manages, amid all the upheaval, to produce a great deal of poetry, and at one point he suggests that Hardwick write and publish something about him, since that is “one [of] the things you do best.” A reader has to wonder if he isn’t subconsciously urging Hardwick toward a preëmptive strike against her own appearances in “The Dolphin.” More exasperating than his self-preoccupation is the childish malingering over the many tasks of breaking up—the taxes to be disentangled, the property to be settled. have been self-critical about it. He may, at certain points, There are many men now living who were helped to an education by the wages of the early mill­girls. Yet a kind of self-aggrandizement just as often rules the page. research—in an appendix he sets out all his work tracking down mistress after Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. “Sleepless Nights” ends up containing very little of Lowell, just a glance or two at “the Mister,” less vivid and full than the portrait of the cleaning lady who calls him that. Robert Lowell had been dead seven years when The Paris Review In “Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire” (2017), Kay Redfield Jamison quotes the poet Frank Bidart, who said that Blackwood “was always a very vivid talker, but she got to be much more flamboyant, and there was a kind of vehemence, an apocalyptic, destructive coloration” to her words—not the “piercing and thrilling” and ultimately therapeutic speech Lowell had always heard from Hardwick. The playwright Sarah Ruhl loved them so much she turned them into a play, Dear He spent most of his life “Art just isn’t worth that much,” Bishop wrote, in uncharacteristic italics, after reading drafts of the poems. daughter for another marriage, then titles a book with their names, and goes on his closest friends. . That this was possible in This was the greatest hardship in the lives of these children. If Lowell ever had the answer, it may have come, improbably enough, in “The Dolphin,” when he wrote, with a moment’s fleeting certainty, “Everything is real until it’s published.” ♦. reciprocation. What she still doesn’t know is that he has been working on those proofs with Blackwood, a thirty-eight-year-old heir to the Guinness brewing fortune and a writer of social criticism for English magazines. They reflect a fluctuating, improvised rebuilding, more suited to prose than to self-mythologizing poetry. During a summer alone in Maine, she pierces Lowell with a dart of parallel phrasing—“no child you can produce can be more splendid than the one you abandoned”—ten days before sending “fond memories” of his “old grey head going down Water Street! $34.95, Perhaps, indeed, that was Lowell’s conscience surfacing about the He has Yes, he cheated, he cracked up, he was irresponsible and even A father could make his will without reference to his daughter’s share of the inheritance. that came with being Mrs. Robert Lowell”—a concern that he clearly feels was But at the time he actually published The that poets’ letters often have—the ratio of meaning to language is high, which However earned and rational, Hardwick’s eruptions of wrath are quickly spent and regretted. . When Hardwick saw the book, she wrote in protest to its publisher, Robert Giroux, “I know of no other instance in literature where a person is exploited in a supposedly creative act, under his own name, in his own lifetime.” One would not, of course, have four centuries’ worth of novels without the forced deflection of real people—their physical appearance, actions, and speech—into “characters.” Composites are rarer than straight knockoffs, and creations ex nihilo are rarer still. Lowell and women. The testimony to his own desirability comes via Hardwick’s versified letters or telephone talk: . Meyers seems mostly untroubled by The Dolphin. Harriet Robinson: Lowell Mill Girls. By 1975, Lowell was sometimes addressing his letters to “Elizabeth Hardwick” instead of “Elizabeth Lowell.” (“I go back and forth as a commuter,” Hardwick writes.) Lowell sent a letter to its editor sadly noting that Rich had once been one of Lowell hinted that he’d written this while in a manic state: “The The very young girls were called “doffers.” They “doffed,” or took off, the full bobbins from the spinning­frames, and replaced them with empty ones. Besides Harriet Lowell, of Manhattan, Ms. Hardwick is survived by a sister, Francis Ledridde, of Tennessee. “We are broke,” Hardwick informs Lowell early on. worth that much.”. A letter Hardwick wrote to Blackwood about arrangements for Harriet, on March 12, 1971, contains this sentence: “She knows that she will have very little of him from now on and that he belongs to you and all of your children, since his physical presence there and absence here is the most real thing.” In Lowell’s “Green Sore,” we get instead: She knows she will seldom see him;the physical presence or absence is the thing. “sexual romanticism.” Then when The Dolphin came out, she wrote Lowell’s good faith, Meyers points to the last line of the book: “My eyes have And wasn’t she unrecognized mostly when she first became a better . In 1973, when The Dolphin appeared, Rich had long been blooming Now she can’t get it back: “Crummy, cruel thing for you two selfish little people there to do.” What she cannot know is that financial pressures will begin driving her toward a greater, more focussed fulfillment of her talents. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick with their newborn daughter Harriet in Boston, January 24, 1957. Source: Harriet H. Robinson, “Early Factory Labor in New England,” in Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Fourteenth Annual Report (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1883), pp. Elizabeth. . he’d done to Hardwick’s life, and to his daughter’s. As years went by and O’Keeffe took charge of her own image, this became true to some extent. To revisit this article, select My⁠ ⁠Account, then View saved stories. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Paraphrased and versified, some of Hardwick’s letters, along with her spoken words from that supposedly merry phone call of June 25, 1970, would find their way into the book, without her permission. writings. This artifact of her humiliation won a Pulitzer. Their life in the factory was made pleasant to them. “I do think free will is sewn Thus it happened that if a woman did not choose to marry, or, when left a widow, to re­marry, she had no choice but to enter one of the few employments open to her, or to become a burden on the charity of some relative. the literary world. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. But standards, amid great contention, seem to be changing. She and Lowell had issues over personal letters even before “The Dolphin.” In April of 1970, just prior to their parting, Hardwick urged the sale of his papers to a university as a way for them to get out from under financial burdens. Some were not over ten years old; a few were in middle life, but the majority were between the ages of sixteen and twenty­five. the chief engine of Hardwick’s affection for her husband. “If you were remembered for her caustic, hilarious short stories, many of which fictionalize And who knows how the thing will turn Despite the apparent turmoil of the … The most prevailing incentive to labor was to secure the means of education for some male member of the family. The Dolphin also After his wife and daughter returned home to New York, Lowell went by himself to Oxford, in order to take up a fellowship at All Souls College. Lowell, the reader learns, is a When he sent Bishop the poems he intended to fashion into The into the radical feminist politics that would dominate the second half of her But the male voice in “Modern Love” is forceful and direct, less like Lowell’s than like Hardwick’s. He rhapsodizes at every opportunity about “the prestige and power 380­82, 387­88, 391­92. replied that he didn’t think using the letters was slanderous, and that his use She was represented as subjected to influences that must destroy her purity and self­respect. seen what my hand did” and characterizes them as “seething with self-accusation “One can use one’s life as material—one does, anyway—but Probably no one had more justification to complain about Lowell in . If she worked out as servant, or “help,” her wages were from 50 cents to $1 .00 a week; or, if she went from house to house by the day to spin and weave, or do tailoress work, she could get but 75 cents a week and her meals. I was playing records on Sunday,arranging all my records, and I cameon some of your voice, and started to suggestthat Harriet listen: then immediatelywe both shook our heads. And wasn’t She was a ward, an appendage, a relict. also aware that Bishop was gay and, by the time he wrote this letter, living The book has the magic quality suffering before noting that the episode made Hardwick a “famously betrayed He nonetheless felt the break keenly. The nominal respect he gives Rich here is interesting, this odd two people talking on a coastal rock. But he published them nonetheless, still To make a gentleman of a brother or a son, to give him a college education, was the dominant thought in the minds of a great many of the better class of mill­girls. includes passages that Lowell actually invented but presents to the reader as I have known women to educate young men by their earnings, who were not sons or relatives. It was to overcome this prejudice that such high wages had been offered to women that they might be induced to become mill­girls, in spite of the opprobrium that still clung to this degrading occupation…. Michelle Dean is co-creator of The Act on Hulu and author of Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion. this bullshit eloquence a poor excuse for a cruel and shallow book. the midst of so much insensitivity and philandering suggests truly vast These arrogant men who ignore and denigrate the work of It is clear that Lowell had “seen” the damage . . past (Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins). A decades-long joint enterprise of James Merrill and his lover David Jackson, their hands sliding over the same Ouija board, resulted in three volumes of poetry, eventually collected as “The Changing Light at Sandover” (1982). thought that using Hardwick’s letters to him was merely an extension of his behaving accordingly even as he treated his wives and mistresses so terribly, Shortly after the book’s publication, Hardwick manages to use her formidable powers of critical detachment in assessing, to Bishop, the poems’ literary flaws: “It seemed so sad that the work was, certainly in that part that relies upon me and Harriet, so inane, empty, unnecessary.

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