Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, Ed. by Saskia Hamilton
PositiveThe New York Review of Books... in this curious way brought together again two people who were never fully separated and never fully reunited. Fittingly, their communication is faltering and out of sync. Letters cross and leave unanswered questions. But the distance between them is less of a force than their continuing need to write to each other ... The Hardwick-Lowell correspondence on its own would make a fat book, but a less absorbing and significant one than Hamilton has created by including letters to and from the writers who constituted \'their circle.\' Hardwick and Lowell couldn’t help but write sharp-edged, moving letters, often. But not always; and to follow every annotated step on their path to that ordinary calamity—divorce—can feel like watching a slow-motion train wreck. Being understandably preoccupied with themselves, each other, their daughter, and their taxes, they fall into the clichés proper to their stock roles (the abandoned wife, the feckless, wandering husband). The other voices Hamilton introduces counter that effect and enlarge the picture ... Some of it is familiar ... [Blackwood] is an indistinct presence in this book, represented by only a few letters and what others say about her.
Megan Marshall
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewMarshall is a skilled reader who points out telling echoes between Bishop’s published and private writing. Her account is enriched by a cache of revelatory, recently discovered documents. These include a sensational series of letters from Bishop to her psychoanalyst ... Marshall’s narrative is smooth and brisk: an impressive feat, given the mass of evidence she had to deal with. But Bishop’s life was hardly smooth, and the story is told too briskly. Key aspects of Bishop’s creativity — her work as a visual artist, her passion for music, her literary translations — Marshall treats swiftly or simply passes over ... we get little sense of Bishop’s idiosyncratic voice, with its anxious qualifications, dry wit and looping self-reference ... we don’t learn enough about Marshall for her life to take on independent interest, and the memoir ends up being mainly a distraction.
