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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast.

My name is Thomas Jones, and today I'm talking to Column Tobin,

who's written a piece in the current issue of the LRB on one of the great or terrible literary love triangles of the 20th century.

The piece is a review of two books,

a new edition of Robert Lowell's 1972 collection, The Dolphin, edited by Saskia Hamilton, and the Dolphin Letters, 1970 to 79, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell and Their Circle, also edited by Saskia Hamilton. Hello, Colin. Thank you for joining us. Hi, hi, how I is. Lowell once described his poetry as my autobiography and verse, and before we get to the writing, we really need to talk about the writer's lives.

The breakdown of Hardwick and Lowell's marriage seems to have happened very suddenly,

50 years ago in April 1970, at a party in London.

Do you want to take us through that story, which you begin your piece with?

Lowell, I suppose, he comes to it as a poet in various guises,

but he was very famous, really, when he was very young,

and he's married to Elizabeth Hardwick,

who was really one of those sort of fierce literary critics

working for various magazines in New York.

So when they met and married,

they really were a very sort of powerful and serious literary couple in New York. Part of their

power arose from the fact that it was, we were both involved with the founding of the New York

Review books. And they lived on the Upper West Side. And there really was a sense of them as living the life of the mind in New York and associating

with very interesting literary people.

And Lowell had a trust fund and that made a difference.

It meant they had a nice house in Maine and Kustin and a nice apartment in New York,

...