I recently came across two long reviews of A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwicke, by Cathy Curtis.      All I knew about Elizabeth Hardwicke was that she had married the American poet Robert Lowell, was prominent in the New York literary scene, was a very well-respected literary critic and was one of the group of people who established The New York Review of Books in 1963.

I have always been a hesitant reader of biographies; and of autobiographies. At times reading the former I would stop reading, overcome with an uneasy feeling of intrusion, or spying, or even worse, schadenfreude. How, I would wonder, thinking of my own life, could someone outside of me really know what was going on in my head, in my relationships, in my day-to-day existence, even if they could put me in the context of my times? How then could a biographer successfully capture the complexities of another’s life, often having never known them, reliant on others’ memories and interpretations, fragments left of a life, strands of long gone, old writings, old documents, photos, mementos which so ambiguously surround one. And autobiographies and memoirs, with all the underlying strains of the writer searching for meaning in the constant struggle of their living, wavering through the need for hubris and the need for privacy, the outbursts, the silences. Or even more disappointingly, the obvious papering over of what others on the outside can guess at but which the protagonist wants to deny. A minefield all round. And yet biographies, autobiographies and memoirs continue to pour forth and we, the onlookers, continue to read them, and more importantly, often learn a great deal from them, especially about the social and historical context surrounding lives.  

And so it would be should I ever get round to reading Cathy Curtis’s book. It is now on my long list of books to read. 

Elizabeth Hardwicke, it appears was, like all of us, a woman of many contradictions: a woman of great determination and ambition, a writer of two published novels, a trenchant critic of renown, a feminist, who, at her most caustic was able to rail against marriage in a letter to her dear friend Mary McCarthy in 1973.  At the age of 57, a recent and unwitting divorcee, she described the husbands and wives at a writers’ residency she attended in Italy. Her picture of the compliant, supportive wife, whose only power is to create guilt – the revenge of wives – is shocking and quite vicious.

This from a woman who supported Robert Lowell through his many ‘episodes’ in mental institutions (today it is called bi-polar disorder), who raised their daughter through it all, who encouraged his writing during the 23 years of marriage, (as well as endeavouring to foster her own literary ambitions) only to be told in trans-Atlantic correspondence that the marriage was over, and she was to be replaced with a younger English wifely version, writer Lady Caroline Blackwood. Even more egregious, she was to discover that Lowell would later use and alter her private correspondence with him in the last highly acclaimed work of his sonnet sequence, The Dolphin, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1974.

Lowell died in a taxi en route to visit Hardwicke on his return to New York in 1977 after the collapse of his last marriage.  Elizabeth Hardwicke died in 2007.  The very public nature of this long relationship between Hardwicke and Lowell has been described variously as ‘a tormented and tormenting one’, as ‘restless and emotionally harrowing’…

What to make of this extraordinary contradiction in Hardwicke’s life? Does the passage of twenty-three years of sharing a terrible struggle with mood disorders bring with it an enduring sense of responsibility on the part of the onlooking partner? Does simply the passage of shared years imbue relationships with a deeper sense of connection? What of the shared intellectual lives? The years of talking about ideas, language, poetry, literature, shared passions? What to make of all of these strands? Do they in the end amount to what we call loyalty? Is loyalty ever-enduring? At what point can a loyal person call it quits? What are the moral consequences? And what part does that elusive concept of love play in it all? Who can ever tell now what drove that relationship forward? Probably even then the protagonists themselves would not be able to unravel its mysteries. 

So maybe the point of thinking about other people’s lives, about biographies and autobiographies, is to make us ponder on these questions, to take them into our own lives, to force us to move forward one way or the other.  Ah, the complexities of the human condition and the power of the written word.