New York Story

From Darryl Pinckney's introduction to the NYRB The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick

Hardwick met Robert Lowell in 1948, when she was summoned by a group of literary wives to a midtown hotel to be questioned as to whether she was having an affair with Allen Tate. (Many years later when Tate’s biographer informed her that Tate had claimed that they had had an affair, she said that Tate could have an affair with her for his biography if it meant that much to him.) She was given martinis at her interrogation, needed help when some of Tate’s friends, Lowell among them, broke up the meeting, and as Lowell handed her into a taxi, she turned and threw up at his feet. She once hid in a doorway along Second Avenue when she saw him coming, so great was her attraction to him.

They met again, at Yaddo, toward the end of 1948. He was just arriving; she was leaving. Lowell asked Hardwick to come back and she did.



Thirty years after his death in a taxi in 1977 at her door [coming directly from JFK, coming back to her after leaving her for another woman] she said she still wept for Lowell’s genius.