Later that spring Elizabeth wrote from her teaching job in Seattle to thank Adrienne for sending her Diving into the Wreck, and to respond to a passage from Adrienne’s 1972 essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” which had been reprinted in a special issue of the Harvard Advocate, the college’s literary journal, on “Feminine Sensibility.” The essay was an invitation to women writers to unite in “refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society,” and “to see—and therefore live—afresh.” The portion published in the Advocate referred to Elizabeth directly: “Much of woman’s poetry has been in the nature of the blues song: a cry of pain, of victimization, or a lyric of seduction. (Or, like Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, she kept human sexual relationships at a measured and chiselled distance in her poems.)”
“Today, much poetry by women—and prose for that matter—is charged with anger,” Adrienne continued. She applauded the development: “I think we need to go through that anger.” The effort to achieve “objectivity” or “detachment”—“to sound as cool as Jane Austen or as Olympian as Shakespeare”—was pointless, could only “betray our own reality.” In the past, “every woman writer has written for men,” she argued, establishing a central tenet of feminist literary criticism in the coming decades, while men rarely wrote with the opinions of women foremost in their minds. It was time for women to “stop being haunted” by “internalized fears of being and saying themselves.”
Elizabeth wrote to assure Adrienne she had no objections: “I don’t mind what you say of me at all—probably perfectly true.” And as for the anger, “I’m sure you’re absolutely right.” Elizabeth conceded, “I must have felt the same way many years ago—but my only method of dealing with it was to refuse to admit it.” One of the poems Elizabeth praised in Diving into the Wreck was Adrienne’s “The Phenomenology of Anger,” which read in part:
“The only real love I have ever felt
was for children and other women.
Everything else was lust, pity,
self-hatred, pity, lust.”
This is a woman’s confession.
Yet Adrienne’s poems weren’t so much confessional as they were polemical. Like her essay, whose title, borrowed from Ibsen, she also gave to a poem in her collection, they framed arguments, putting Elizabeth in mind of Marianne Moore’s long poem “Marriage.” Elizabeth had assigned “Marriage” to her students in Seattle that semester, though few sympathized with Moore’s critique or appreciated her humor: “I wonder what Adam and Eve / think of it by this time.”
In avoiding direct confession, Elizabeth and Adrienne shared a reluctance to join “The School of Anguish,” and a determination to keep the specific details of their intimate lives private. Elizabeth attributed her instinctive reticence, which had prompted her to apologize to Adrienne for confiding, even in the seclusion of a car’s front seat, to her “Scotch-Canadian-Protestant-Puritan” temperament. Elizabeth sometimes wished, as she’d written to Alice after her double collapse in Ouro Prêto, that she could be more like other writers she knew, who “drink worse than I do, at least badly & all the time, and don’t seem to have any regrets or shame—just write poems about it.” But these were all men. Would Elizabeth, as she hinted to Adrienne, write something more “frank” on the situation of women?
In a sense she already had, with “In the Waiting Room,” adapting the principle of confessional poetry she’d outlined years before in the Time interview—“the idea is that we live in a horrible and terrifying world, and the worst moments of horrible and terrifying lives are an allegory of the world.” The astonishment Elizabeth remembered feeling at being “one of them,” after viewing pendulous breasts in National Geographic, scanning the room’s adult female inhabitants, hearing her “foolish” aunt’s cry of pain, was an allegory of every girl’s shocking realization of what growing up to become a woman could mean. Yet Elizabeth had managed the Olympian distance and objectivity, along with a charged immediacy, that her younger colleague thought impossible or inauthentic in these angry times. “In the Waiting Room” was a poem written by a woman about a girl’s perceptions, but the “subject matter”—growing up, experiencing self-consciousness—was universal.
And although Adrienne had no way of knowing, Elizabeth was fully capable of writing poems that celebrated “human sexual relationships.” She wrote one now for no one but Alice to see, called “Breakfast Song,” expressing her love and the fear she could not shake:
My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue.
I kiss your funny face,
your coffee-flavored mouth.
Last night I slept with you.
Today I love you so
how can I bear to go
(as soon I must, I know)
to bed with ugly death
in that cold, filthy place,
to sleep there without you,
without the easy breath
and nightlong, limblong warmth
I’ve grown accustomed to?
—Nobody wants to die;
tell me it is a lie!
But no, I know it’s true.
It’s just the common case;
there’s nothing one can do.
My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue
early & instant blue
Even as she confided in Alice her fears of death and aging, Elizabeth scolded Cal, six years her junior, “Please, please don’t talk about old age so much, my dear old friend!” Recurrent breakdowns had left him pale and haggard, his white hair, grown long in the fashion of the times, a hazy corona. In his late fifties, Cal felt himself to be “de-effervescing,” inclined toward what Elizabeth considered premature lament. “If only age could stop; and inspiration be an irregular constant,” he’d written to her in March 1973. For Cal’s benefit Elizabeth claimed to have no such qualms—“in spite of aches & pains I really don’t feel much different than I did at 35 . . . I just won’t feel ancient”—although inspiration eluded her once again after the spurt of productivity during the spring of “The Moose.” She had not offered the New Yorker another poem since. By contrast, Cal had three books going to press at once: History, a substantially revised, expanded, and rearranged version of the unrhymed sonnets that had appeared in Notebook; For Lizzie and Harriet, a compilation of the sonnets on family life extracted from Notebook; and an entirely new volume, The Dolphin. “The three books are my magnum opus, are the best or rather they’ll do,” he’d written as his ambitions for them rose and sank along with his moods.
Cal at Milgate House, photograph by Walker Evans, 1973
The third of these had given Elizabeth a great deal more to scold Cal about. Ever since his appropriation of Jean Stafford’s complaints against him for use in The Mills of the Kavanaughs, she’d been troubled by Cal’s magpie tendency to scavenge materials from the lives and writings of those close to him and reshape them for his own ends. Elizabeth herself had not been immune. May Swenson had been resentful on Elizabeth’s behalf ten years before when Cal had lifted whole phrases “word by word” from her story “In the Village” and recast them as a poem he called “The Scream.” “Of course it’s a compliment in a way,” May had written after reading the poem in the Kenyon Review, “but in another way it’s an unnecessary adaptation—why do it?” In that instance, Elizabeth told May, Cal had asked her approval, sending a draft in advance, and she’d decided to take the compliment; in both the Kenyon Review and Cal’s book For the Union Dead, in which “The Scream” was published in 1965, Cal had credited Elizabeth and her story. She was content, as well, to be the unnamed companion in his poem “Water,” which described their day alone in Stonington in 1948, although “I swear he has my dream wrong,” she wrote to May. “One night you dreamed / you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile, / and trying to pull / off the barnacles with your hands,” Cal had written. She did not object to his summary of their mutual resignation to a platonic love, that day
and since:
We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.
But Cal had given Elizabeth no warning of the sonnet published in late 1970, one of a quartet “For Elizabeth Bishop” in the British edition of his revised Notebook. The first three had lifted her spirits when Cal sent them to her in draft during the dark months in Ouro Prêto the previous February; but not the fourth. There was no mistaking the source of phrases cribbed, once again word for word, from a letter describing her anguish as relations with Roxanne Cumming deteriorated and her mourning for Lota intensified: “. . . the worst situation I’ve ever / had to cope with. I can’t see the way out.” It was just the kind of nakedly confessional poem Elizabeth herself would never have written, and now he’d done it for her.
Cal wrote when it was too late, after publication, admitting, “I may owe you an apology for versing one of your letters.” But he defended himself: “what could be as real”—Cal’s highest aim—“as your own words . . . ?” He claimed the portrait of Elizabeth that emerged as he quoted further from the letter, a passage in which she pictured herself seeking the “faint blue glimmer” of daylight ahead “after hours of stumbling along” in a cave—“air never looked so beautiful before”—only “does you honor.” But these weren’t precisely Elizabeth’s words. Inevitably he’d altered her sentences to fit his sonnet’s blank verse meter and to suit his own purposes, as with the final lines in which Elizabeth addressed Cal gratefully: “. . . Your last letter helped, / like being mailed a lantern or a spiked stick.” The imagery of Elizabeth’s original letter had been still more “real,” or realistic: “like being handed a lantern or a spiked walking stick.”
Elizabeth never responded to his letter of apology, but when Cal asked her to read the manuscript of The Dolphin a year later, in February 1972, saying “I am going to publish, and don’t want advice, except for yours,” she did not hold back. Seventeen months before, in September 1970, as Elizabeth had been preparing for her first semester at Harvard, Cal had written with news from England: “I have someone else.” He’d fallen in love with Lady Caroline Blackwood, a younger writer and an heir to the Guinness brewery fortune; he intended to leave his marriage. This Elizabeth could accept. She could even sympathize with the troubles that doubtless lay ahead; she’d had “someone else,” and would soon have Alice. Both Cal and Elizabeth had sought young lovers. Then Cal began writing yet more sonnets, a verse diary of his marital collapse and simultaneous self-rejuvenation with Caroline, quoting passages from Lizzie’s bitter, grief-stricken letters to achieve the crucial realism. These became The Dolphin.
Elizabeth had never been especially fond of Lizzie Hardwick, though like all of Cal’s friends she understood that his second wife’s loyalty through his many breakdowns and affairs had kept Cal alive and writing. Now her heart went out to Lizzie and Harriet, who could hardly take comfort in the companion volume of poems bearing their names that may have been Cal’s idea of appeasement: republished sonnets of familial affection that marked, at best, a lull before the storm. The Dolphin, which would win Cal his second Pulitzer Prize, was where his energy was concentrated. Yet, while recognizing the strength of the poems, Elizabeth tried her best to persuade him not to publish—or to delay until the crisis had passed. The book was set to appear less than a year after his divorce and remarriage, two years after Sheridan, his son with Caroline, was born. Cal would not listen—“I couldn’t bear to have my book (my life) wait inside me like a dead child.”
Reading the manuscript of The Dolphin, named for Caroline—“My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,” ran the first line of the closing sonnet—Elizabeth could see that Cal would do plenty of damage even without quoting his ex-wife’s letters. Caroline, fifteen years younger than Lizzie, was also “my fresh wife,” and a “Mermaid” of Cal’s own dreams: “Alice-in-Wonderland straight gold hair, / fair-featured, curve and bone from crown to socks.” But Elizabeth, who shared Cal’s devotion to the real, or the “true,” in her preferred term—“Poetry has got to be true,” she’d once said in explaining her efforts to accurately represent a goat’s eyes in “Crusoe in England”—built her case on the cannibalized letters, and Cal’s deliberate alterations of them.
He’d written “magnificent,” “honest poetry—almost,” she said of The Dolphin in manuscript. Elizabeth loved reading writers’ letters; she’d taught a course in them at Harvard her second year. But Lizzie was still alive, she had not given permission—“aren’t you violating a trust?” To use “personal, tragic, anguished letters” in this way—“it’s cruel.” And worse, Cal had “changed her letters” to fit his lines and to alter meaning, “loading the dice so against” Lizzie. In some passages the words didn’t sound like Lizzie’s; in others Elizabeth could read excisions and emendations on the page. “In general, I deplore the ‘confessional,’” she told him, “when you wrote Life Studies perhaps it was a necessary movement, and it helped make poetry more real, fresh and immediate.” But now, “anything goes,” and Cal had gone too far, with borrowed lines like:
“I think of you every minute of the day,
I love you every minute of the day;
you gone is hollow, bored, unbearable.
I feel under some emotional anaesthetic,
unable to plan or think or write or feel . . .”
Once again Cal was forcing someone else into public confession with words that purported to be her own, when in fact many were “made up.” The damage to Lizzie, the wrong done to her as a writer as well as a devoted wife, would be irreversible—“art just isn’t worth that much.”
Cal responded defensively, insisting it was “the revelation” that troubled Elizabeth, not the misleading “mixture of truth and fiction” as she had charged. He claimed to have softened the letters already, and that by cutting them “drastically” he had painted Lizzie in a better light—“the original is heartbreaking, but interminable.” He would rearrange and revise yet again, turn Lizzie’s words “milder,” but “making the poem unwounding is impossible.” Still, Elizabeth’s emphatically phrased warning—“I love you so much I can’t bear to have you publish something that I regret and that you might live to regret, too”—had pierced him. “Who can want to savage a thing,” he asked, unable to find an answer. “How can I want to hurt?”
Elizabeth made her point about the letters one last time—“you’ve changed them—& you had no right to do that”—and then let the “painful subject” rest. Cal asked Elizabeth to be Sheridan’s godmother, and Elizabeth was “delighted” to accept. They exchanged letters of concern and affection for Frank Bidart, “our Frankie” to Elizabeth, the young Harvard doctoral student and poet who knew Cal’s sonnets so well he’d spent months in England with Cal, sorting out revisions and devising a proper sequence for more than five hundred poems, “gone over for about the thousandth time.” In Cal’s absence in Cambridge, Frank—a tall, clean-shaven Californian, whose urbanity belied his Bakersfield upbringing—had become Elizabeth’s most reliable companion after Alice. Frank had been the one to visit “every single day” while Alice was at work, bringing “quarts of vanilla ice-cream” and “$$$$$$ worth of coffee from the French coffee shop” during a week’s hospitalization for asthma at the end of Elizabeth’s second term at Harvard, staying while she “talked his ear off” and “even wept” under the effects of cortisone. But now Cal was returning to teach again at Harvard in the fall of 1973. In the end, he’d wangled a three-year leave. With the contract extending her employment through retirement age still unsigned, Elizabeth worried that her position might be in jeopardy. “Please, please don’t let any of this academic stuff come between us to the slightest degree,” she wrote to Cal when inquiring about his plans. “I think we both need to keep our old friends—for the rest of our lives—don’t you . . . ?” “We (you & I) are together till life’s end,” Cal replied. Elizabeth’s contract was signed.
She was a full-time professor now, with health benefits year-round.
Cal’s three books appeared, and Lizzie was wounded. The influential weeklies—Time, Newsweek, the New Republic—reviewed The Dolphin, and the damage spread as Lizzie’s versed letters were quoted and the marriage was dissected. Cal understood, as he hadn’t before, that Lizzie didn’t want to “think of herself as being injured,” or have others see her that way. She became distraught; her friends sat suicide watch. “We dread the telephone,” Cal wrote to Elizabeth from Milgate House, the centuries-old country house he’d bought with Caroline in Kent, forty miles from London. “Your old letter of warning—I never solved the problem of the letters,” he admitted now. Indeed there was confusion over “fact and fiction,” and Cal had willfully ignored the potential for “big circulation” magazines to “reduce my plot to news or scandal.” It was “not enough,” he knew, that Lizzie came off as “brilliant and lovable more than anyone in the book,” and Cal as flawed, an errant husband. The Dolphin was as great a betrayal as his desertion of wife and daughter: “My sin (mistake?) was publishing.”
Cal’s admission of guilt, or of feeling guilty, earned Elizabeth’s sympathy. “We all have irreparable and awful actions on our consciences,” she wrote, commiserating. “I just try to live without blaming myself for them every day.” Elizabeth knew she had wronged Lota, and perhaps also Lilli and Roxanne, who had followed her to Cambridge in hopes of a reconciliation, only to be firmly rebuffed. She’d disappointed herself, leaving books unfinished, essays unwritten, poems incomplete. “But for God’s sake don’t quote me!” Elizabeth made Cal promise. She could not quite trust him to leave her letters alone.
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