Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick with their newborn daughter Harriet in Boston, January 24, 1957. Alfred Eisenstaedt/The Life Picture Collection/Getty

Robert Lowell had been dead seven years when The Paris Review interviewed Elizabeth Hardwick, the novelist, critic, and his second-to-last wife. In the conversation, she admitted that “Cal,” as everyone called Lowell—a boarding school nickname that stuck—sometimes thought her critical work “snippy” but:



He liked women writers and I don’t think he ever had a true interest in a woman who wasn’t a writer—an odd turn-on indeed, and one I’ve noticed not greatly shared. Women writers don’t tend to be passive vessels or wives, saying, “Oh, that’s good, dear.”

Probably no one had more justification to complain about Lowell in print than Hardwick did. Though they were married for 23 years, their union was worn down by Lowell’s nearly annual hospitalizations for manic depression, his endless philandering, and his alcoholism. At the end of it, almost on a whim, he left her for the writer and “muse”—always a loaded term, that—Lady Caroline Blackwood. Then he took Hardwick’s alternately furious and anguished letters to him and folded them, without her consent, into a full-length book of poetry, The Dolphin. This artifact of her humiliation won a Pulitzer. Yet Hardwick still continued to try to get him back, right up to the day of his death.

This all provides pretty good copy, as they like to say, for Jeffrey Meyers’s new book, Robert Lowell in Love, a detailed accounting of the women Lowell pursued and lived and conversed with. Hardwick was the second wife of three. The first had been Jean Stafford, a writer now chiefly remembered for her caustic, hilarious short stories, many of which fictionalize the events of this disastrous relationship. Before the figurative banns were even issued, a drunken Lowell got them into a car accident that left Stafford permanently disfigured. Their subsequent wedded bliss was marked by mutual alcoholism, a punch in the face that broke Stafford’s nose once again, and four months in prison for Lowell, who claimed conscientious objector status in World War II.

ROBERT LOWELL IN LOVE by Jeffrey Meyers University of Massachusetts Press, 288 pp. $34.95

But while Meyers presents what is clearly a considerable amount of research—in an appendix he sets out all his work tracking down mistress after mistress—he misrepresents the texture of Lowell’s relationship with Hardwick in particular, and with women more generally. Lowell, the reader learns, is a “hunk” with a “harem” of female devotees. Meyers titles the chapter chronicling the experiences of Lowell’s mistresses as “The Heedless Heart,” apparently unironically. He rhapsodizes at every opportunity about “the prestige and power that came with being Mrs. Robert Lowell”—a concern that he clearly feels was the chief engine of Hardwick’s affection for her husband.

This is unfortunate, and not just as regards historical accuracy. We live in a time of abnormally loud complaint about Men Who Explain Things in the literary world. These arrogant men who ignore and denigrate the work of women are discussed and analyzed, again and again, to the point where it has felt, recently, like there is no other kind of male writer. But Lowell was never like that. Yes, he cheated, he cracked up, he was irresponsible and even cruel in the way he marshaled his life for his art. Lowell nonetheless believed that women were his intellectual and artistic equals. He spent most of his life behaving accordingly even as he treated his wives and mistresses so terribly, in romantic terms, that it was almost operatic. That is the puzzle of Lowell and women.