Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  21. Jonathan Raban, interview with I.H. (1979).

  22. Ibid.

  23. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, March 9, 1972.

  24. Philip Edwards, letter to I.H., January 28, 1982.

  25. Dudley Young, letter to I.H., January 27, 1982.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Gabriel Pearson, interview with I.H. (1980).

  28. Philip Edwards, letter to I.H., January 28, 1982.

  29. Martha Ritter, interview with I.H. (1981).

  30. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, September 29, 1971.

  31. Elizabeth Hardwick in interview with I.H. (1982): “Re. my ‘Notebook,’ I told Cal I was writing a sort of memoir, putting it in a handsome leather book with fine paper which had been given to me as a present by John Thompson. Cal had certain grandiose ideas about this ‘Notebook,’ also known as, my title, a joking one, ‘Smiling Through.’ I did very little of it, came upon it later and threw it away. Cal, I think, hoped it would be deliciously acerb and ‘interesting.’ Instead the little I wrote was sentimental and I tore it up like many another false start.”

  32. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, October 1, 1971.

  33. R.L. to Frank Bidart, n.d. (Houghton Library).

  34. Frank Bidart, interview with I.H. (1981).

  35. Ibid.

  36. R.L., For Lizzie and Harriet (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), p. 21.

  37. Frank Bidart, interview with I.H. (1981).

  38. Stanley Kunitz to R.L., April 19, 1972 (Houghton Library).

  39. Ibid., August 16, 1972 (Houghton Library).

  40. Elizabeth Bishop to R.L., October 26, 1972 (Houghton Library).

  41. Ibid., March 21, 1972 (Houghton Library).

  42. R.L. to Christopher Ricks, March 21, 1972.

  43. R.L. to Alan Brownjohn, May 16, 1972.

  44. Alan Brownjohn, interview with I.H. (1980).

  45. Jonathan Raban, interview with I.H. (1980).

  46. William Alfred to R.L., March 12, 1972 (Houghton Library).

  47. R.L. to William Alfred, n.d.

  48. R.L. to Frank Bidart, April 10, 1972 (Houghton Library). In the original ms of The Dolphin, the section called “Burden” comprised eleven poems. In the published book, ten of these (heavily revised) are placed in the section called “Marriage.” They are “Knowing,” Question,” “Overhanging Cloud,” “Gold Lull,” “Green Sore,” “Letter,” “Late Summer at Milgate,” “Ninth Month,” “Morning Away from You” and “Robert Sheridan Lowell.” A comparison of the ms Dolphin with the published text suggests that Lowell’s efforts to “depersonalize” were minor and halfhearted. Certainly nothing very “outrageous” was suppressed; and fairly often his revisions have slightly muddied the meaning of the original.

  49. Frank Bidart, interview with I.H. (1981).

  50. R.L. to Frank Bidart, May 15, 1972 (Houghton Library).

  51. Frank Bidart, interview with I.H. (1981).

  52. R.L. to William Alfred, n.d.

  24

  The winter of 1971–72 was later remembered by Lowell as one of his most momentous and chaotic. There had, of course, been Sheridan’s birth and the problems (both textual and moral) of The Dolphin. In addition, there were two worrying domestic dramas. In October 1971 a general handyman at Milgate suddenly became “violent, almost insane, with many unpleasant side-effects. We were left with two little girls, a boy still at the breast, and a large, somewhat remote country house—all rather spooky for a week or so, but now over, I think.”1 And in January 1972 Lowell’s stepdaughter Ivana (now aged six) overturned a kettle of boiling water and was badly burned; she spent three months in the hospital, where Lowell visited her several times and marveled at her courage. Children had always rather bored him; now, after two years of being surrounded by small girls, he found himself willing to concede that they could have an unreal kind of attractiveness—as curiosities, however, rather than as bona fide humans:

  Small-soul-pleasing, loved with condescension,

  even through the cro-magnon tirades of six,

  the last madness of child-gaiety

  before the trouble of the world shall hit.

  Being chased upstairs is still instant-heaven,

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Though burned, you are hopeful, experience cannot tell you

  experience is what you do not want to experience.2

  Throughout this same winter, Lowell had been making the first moves towards a divorce settlement with Elizabeth Hardwick. In October, just three days after Sheridan was born, he wrote to her:

  On the will—I mean the settlement—can’t your friendly lawyer draw up what seems right, and then I without a lawyer will object to what I wish to. I’d like to avoid lawyer costs. Though I pay less than my share, my expenses for the baby are heavy, will be. Also my royalties for this half [?] were only a little over $4000—with $7000 last spring. This give [sic] me only 11 or 12 thousand. A drop? Or is there some catch? On the other hand I’ll have 140 thousand in trust from Harvard. Oh I’m well enough off.3

  The Harvard money Lowell speaks of here would come as a result of the sale of his papers to the Houghton Library—all his manuscript material and letters up to 1968. Lowell’s American royalties during the period 1965–70 had risen from $6,500 to over $15,000 (Life Studies and For the Union Dead were his best-selling volumes): the “11 or 12 thousand” he mentions in this letter was therefore a slight falling off. Also, his income from poetry readings had necessarily declined: in Britain the fees for such appearances were tiny, and some of the grander colleges expected their poets to perform for nothing. With teaching, Lowell could probably depend on a minimum earned income of $20,000. He was “well enough off,” but he would have to work.

  Formal divorce proceedings began in September 1972, shortly after Lowell delivered to his publishers the manuscripts of his three books. Dealings with Hardwick through the year had been “cordial,” and of Harriet’s visit at Milgate for eight days in the summer Lowell wrote: “We had the loveliest time, as though she were the same and a grown-up, very young and humorous and kind to her father. We exaggerate the forks made by our choices, or do we?”4

  In October, Lowell and Blackwood flew to New York. A financial agreement had been drawn up (with Blair Clark’s help): essentially, it gave Hardwick and Harriet most of the income from Lowell’s trust fund—some $20,000 a year. Hardwick would also get the New York apartment together with “all tangible personal property—furnishings, works of art, household goods.” As soon as the papers were signed, Lowell and Blackwood flew on to Santo Domingo for a package divorce / marriage. Lady Caroline explains:

  We got married there for technical reasons. It can be done very quickly. You get divorced the same day and then they hurry you to the wedding, which is in a sort of shed. Talk about lack of solemnity. It doesn’t make you feel panic, because it doesn’t feel at all like a marriage. Blair Clark arranged the whole thing—it’s terribly expensive. You go on this honeymoon flight, people who don’t want to get divorced, people who aren’t going to get married to someone else. So it’s a very sinister flight, in a sense. We stayed in Santo Domingo for a couple of days. It was lovely there. It’s a place with grotesque hotels and wonderful rum punches, and the most frightening-looking men you’ve ever seen—international crooks. Cal loved it, because it was so mad. It’s so laid-on, like a package tour—a limousine meets the plane, takes you straight to the place where you get divorced—it was a double divorce, of course, because I was divorcing Israel. The limousine waits and then on to the marriage, which was just a shed with a lot of people typing. They typed all through our marriage. There was no pretense. The typing didn’t stop at all, deafening typing. And the ceremony is in Spanish, of course.5

  The newlyweds arrived back in England in November (they were to be known as “Robert and Lady Caroline Lowell,” he announced), and Sonia Orwell gave them a wedding party in London. Lowell commented on this: “I feel we s
hould appear in black mourning the disgrace of lost alimony, like soldiers who lose a redout [sic]. But we’ve gained more than I can say by the divorce—more than I can say because so much of it is undefinable comfort of mind.”6 Even so, he said he felt

  taken by the divorce settlement, though there was nothing I could do about it. And perhaps anyway after the divorce I am drained of anything to say. I must keep up with her [Hardwick] to keep up with Harriet—and a thousand good memories. All cancelled? No, probably just my mood today.7

  In May 1973 Lowell was still nursing this mild sense of grievance over what he called “a barracuda settlement,” and he was resentful also that Hardwick was planning to sell the Castine house—on this, he hesitated for a time over signing a necessary deed:

  I don’t intend to hold up the deed, much, but it’s naturally sad for me to have the house sold. What are you getting? Should I let it go without worries and suggestions, as if it had only been air to me?

  Also I must have things, personal things, like the eagle, country clothes etc. Not worth much but dear, if I were to see them I would recognize them. I have no legal right to ask this.8

  And again, five days later:

  it’s a desolate thought that all I have from the past is grandpa’s gold watch and some fifteen books…. I am not trying to hold you up more than I have written (except why should I sign away my claim to all my Castine property? The barn isn’t being sold.) I am rather irritated about this being sprung on me suddenly.9

  Perhaps it comforted Lowell that he might have a legitimate grievance against Hardwick; he knew that in July The Dolphin would be published, and that there would surely be a scandal. He hoped that for those with no personal involvement his three books (The Dolphin was published simultaneously with History and For Lizzie and Harriet) would be read simply as books, and that praise of the poetry might outweigh the human blame. In fact, the books mostly were reviewed as books, but not with quite the warmth that Lowell seems to have expected. There was much agreement that his revisions were improvements, although Calvin Bedient in the New York Times Book Review was alert to “repeated reversals of meaning [which] create the sinking impression that all is arbitrary. ‘Often the player’s outdistanced by the game’ runs a line in Notebook; ‘often the player outdistances the game’ runs the revision.”10 As Jonathan Raban has observed, Lowell’s revisions were usually

  a kind of gaming with words, treating them like billiard balls. For almost every sentence that Cal ever wrote if he thought it made a better line he’d have put in a “never” or a “not” at the essential point. His favorite method of revision was simply to introduce a negative into a line, which absolutely reversed its meaning but very often would improve it. So that his poem on Flaubert ended with Flaubert dying, and in the first draft it went “Till the mania for phrases dried his heart”—a quotation from Flaubert’s mother. Then Cal saw another possibility and it came out: “Till the mania for phrases enlarged his heart.” It made perfectly good sense either way round, but the one did happen to mean the opposite of the other.11

  Few reviewers seemed to mind about this kind of thing; the general line was “if the poems taken from Notebook are improved, they are at least more perfectly imperfect.” On The Dolphin, however, the “disinterested” critics were less charitable: there was widespread impatience with the book’s “half fiction” indecisiveness. In Poetry Stephen Yenser wrote:

  “Half fiction”: the phrase, whether intended to exculpate others or not, betrays a concern, felt throughout, that might be thought irrelevant. It makes little difference to the principals whether it happened, one would think, but only whether it were true. Just as no amount of fictionalizing could diminish the actual anguish, so no amount of such anguish can create the necessary fiction. My own doubt has nothing in common with the silly complaint lodged anonymously (in a “scouring voice of 1930 Oxford”) against Yeats and Proust in one of these poems, that some things are too “personal” to be published, but arises from the feeling that The Dolphin is more gossip (fact, data, raw material) than gospel (parable, pattern, truth). Lowell’s sequence is so relentlessly documented (even if the documents are doctored, as the familiar style of the quotations from letters and conversations itself suggests) that the pattern of experience cannot emerge.12

  The Sewanee Review was even more dismissive, caricaturing Lowell’s stance as “Here are the facts, dreams, events, whatever; I present them; they are unimportant, incomprehensible and boring,” and deciding that, yes, “poetically, they are”—Lowell’s “famous talent is everywhere manifested: the poems are not given a chance.”13 And even a sympathetic reviewer like William Pritchard in the Hudson Review felt obliged to concede that “one should feel uneasy about this, should say at some point, yes Lowell has finally gone too far; you can’t turn life into literature twenty minutes or a year later; many of these sonnets are almost inaudible, don’t rise above a private mumble, resist being dragged into the social relationship of poet and reader.”14

  The field was thus wide open for the “personal” reviews, and in this category the most savage onslaught came from Adrienne Rich, at one time a close friend of Lowell’s but they had been out of touch for years. In June 1971 Rich had written to Lowell reproaching him for his treatment of Hardwick; at that time, she probably had no knowledge of the poems he was writing, and certainly did not know of any plans to publish them:

  I feel we are losing touch with each other, which I don’t want….

  I feel a kind of romanticism in your recent decisions, a kind of sexual romanticism with which it is very hard for me to feel sympathy … my affection and admiration for Elizabeth make it difficult to be debonair about something which—however good for her it may ultimately be—has made her suffer.15

  In the September-October 1973 issue of the American Poetry Review Rich wrote as follows:

  There’s a kind of aggrandized and merciless masculinity at work in these books….

  Finally, what does one say about a poet who, having left his wife and daughter for another marriage, then titles a book with their names, and goes on to appropriate his ex-wife’s letters written under the stress and pain of desertion, into a book of poems nominally addressed to the new wife? If this kind of question has nothing to do with art, we have come far from the best of the tradition Lowell would like to vindicate—or perhaps it cannot be vindicated. At the end of The Dolphin Lowell writes:

  I have sat and listened to too many

  words of the collaborating muse,

  and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,

  not avoiding injury to others,

  not avoiding injury to myself—

  to ask compassion … this book, half fiction,

  an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting—

  my eyes have seen what my hand did.

  I have to say that I think this is bullshit eloquence, a poor excuse for a cruel and shallow book, that it is presumptuous to balance injury done to others with injury done to myself—and that the question remains, after all—to what purpose? The inclusion of the letter poems stands as one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry, one for which I can think of no precedent: and the same unproportioned ego that was capable of this act is damagingly at work in all three of Lowell’s books.16

  Adrienne Rich’s review was the most vehement statement of the prosecution case, and Lowell was able to rationalize its intense tone as a symptom of Rich’s dogmatic feminism: in conversation, though, he would refer to it time and again—it always unnerved him to make enemies of friends. For Hardwick, of course, these weeks of publication were acutely painful; her conduct, and her suffering, had been set up for idle public comment—the humblest of hack book reviewers was entitled to muse on the half-fiction characters of “Harriet” and “Lizzie” and to ask which bits of letters were “real” bits, which burst of scolding dialogue was “fact,” and so on. One review, by Marjorie Perloff in the New Republic, even went so far as to v
enture half-judgments on the half-real personalities presented in the poem:

  Poor Harriet emerges from these passages as one of the most unpleasant child figures in history … her cloying moral virtue. It is therefore difficult to participate in the poet’s vacillation, for Lizzie and Harriet seem to get no more than they deserve. And since these are, after all, real people, recently having lived through the crisis described, one begins to question Lowell’s tone.17

  This piece infuriated Hardwick: now, it seemed, the sixteen-year-old Harriet was to be morally examined in the intellectual weeklies. “I never want to hear from you again,” she told Lowell,18 and she wrote letters to his English and American publishers denouncing them as “contemptible.” Robert Giroux recalls: “She said I should have checked out permissions. I hadn’t, for the simple reason I had no idea they were her letters. It seemed to me a strictly personal matter between him and her. I hadn’t known until after Life Studies was published that “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” made use of private letters or conversation, and no one objected.”19 Lowell wrote her calming, hopeful letters: “Most of the hurting reviews … will look very dim by September…. I’m sorry I brought this on you, the ghastly transient voices, the lights”;20 “I can’t defend myself too much, or anyway shouldn’t at this moment if I could. Nothing in the books was dishonestly intended…. I think I am living through many of your feelings. I suffer.”21 Sensibly, Hardwick decided to take a vacation at Lake Como. As for Harriet, she had been at Milgate while the worst of the American reviews were coming out, and by the end of July had set off with a friend to bicycle around in Ireland; according to Lowell, she thought “the trouble was over an imaginary real estate dispute—long since settled in Lizzie’s favor.”22

  In Britain, Lowell claimed, The Dolphin was “just another book of poems,” and to Blair Clark he wrote in injured tones: