The Dolphin Letters: Revisiting Robert Lowell's infamous book

282 he dolphin letters, 1970–1979 collects the bulk of the correspondence between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the torturous years when the writers separated, divorced, and briefly reunited, before Lowell died suddenly in 1977. A subtitle, “Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Their Circle,” is printed at the bottom of the cover, under a photograph of the two writers sharing an apparently happy moment. “Their circle” included such writers as Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Frank Bidart, Stanley Kunitz, and Mary McCarthy, as well as Lowell’s T The Dolphin Letters Revisiting Robert Lowell’s infamous book Dan Chiasson books THE DOLPHIN LETTERS | 283 publishers on both sides of the Atlantic and other assorted confidants . There are sweet and beautiful letters and cables and postcards between Lowell and his teenage daughter Harriet, whose life Lowell cast into upheaval. There are also a few letters written by Caroline Blackwood, Lowell’s new wife, whose London apartment and broken-down country estate in Kent, Milgate Park, Lowell shared o≠ and on throughout the period. Blackwood and her three daughters, along with Lowell and Blackwood’s son, Robert Sheridan Lowell, born in 1971, are on everyone’s minds, but remain mostly o≠stage. Nothing here is simple. The Dolphin is the name of a book of unrhymed sonnets, published by Lowell in 1973, chronicling the end of his twenty-one-year marriage to Hardwick, the a≠air that precipitated its dissolution, and his new life with Blackwood. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. The title of this book—The Dolphin Letters—refers in part to the network of anguished correspondence from the period, including some famous letters about the poems in The Dolphin. But it also refers to a notorious and controversial feature of the original book: Lowell’s incorporation into his poems of quotations from Hardwick’s private letters—communication forged in distress during their separation and divorce. This is “Records” as it appeared in the 1973 Dolphin: “…I was playing records on Sunday, arranging all my records, and I came on some of your voice, and started to suggest that Harriet listen: then immediately we both shook our heads. It was like hearing the voice of the beloved who had died. All this is a new feeling…I got the letter this morning, the letter you wrote me Saturday. I thought my heart would break a thousand times, but I would rather have read it a thousand times than the detached unreal ones you wrote before— you doomed to know what I have known with you, 284 | DAN CHIASSON lying with someone fighting unreality— love vanquished by his mysterious carelessness.” These “letter poems”—which often alter Hardwick’s words, and sometimes attribute whole quotations from others to her—puncture the fantasy of the new life otherwise indulged in The Dolphin, in ways so devastating to Lowell and Caroline Blackwood that they constitute a raid on the entire project of the book. With their evidence of contemporaneous emotional crisis and their unflinching documentary reality, they seem to shatter its frame. And yet The Dolphin eddies around them: The “letter poems” are the project’s distinct compositional feature. Without Hardwick’s voice breaking in, Lowell has no book. But there is a larger frame that must be drawn around The Dolphin. With the publication of Life Studies in 1959, Lowell was regarded as among the most daring of American poets, since in defiance of the Modernist creed of “impersonality” that had informed his early work, he had begun to raid his own autobiography for material. (The term “confessional poetry” was coined by the critic M.L. Rosenthal to disparage this kind of project—an implied “merely” should be heard before his use of the term.) But even as an insult the label shed some light on what gave Lowell’s poetry its power. Its scale was intimate, confiding; to cast its spell it had to feel absolutely authentic, which often meant it had to be costly to those involved. It cut through the ego’s static. It broadcast , almost lawlessly, from a part of the psyche otherwise unexplored . It is easy to see the prohibition on personal material which Lowell overcame as...