December 16, 2019 Issue

Thomas Mallon’s absorbing “Word for Word,” in this week’s issue, shows that Robert Lowell, in using the letters of his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, to write The Dolphin, changed their wording. Mallon says,

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.

He has deleted any explanation of whom he belongs to, and made the mere fact of his existence (“presence” or “absence”), not his location (“there” or “here”), all that seems to matter. It is no longer “the most real thing”—one concern among many—but simply “the thing,” ineffable and all-consuming. These changes alchemize a small piece of gold into a small piece of lead. Lowell slackens Hardwick’s prose into poetry, robs it of precision and pith. 

This is a remarkable passage for two reasons: (1) it shows that Lowell distorted Hardwick’s letter; (2) it’s a tonic departure from the usual view that poetry’s purpose is to transform reality (as opposed to showing it precisely as it is). In Mallon’s view, Hardwick’s letter is gold; Lowell’s distortion of it is lead. I agree. I applaud Mallon for having the guts to say so.