“Nothing worthy to answer your beautiful letters,” Lowell had written to Hardwick upon his release from the hospital.97 The poems in Lizzie’s “rapier voice” in The Dolphin are “piercing and thrilling” to the poet. They arrive between Lowell’s “sidestepping and obliquities,”98 between poems that turn over the courage of his desires, his snail horn perception of feeling, his study of Caroline and the children, his tangle of loyalties and wit. They are unanswerable. Christopher Ricks compares Lowell’s artistic achievement in The Dolphin to the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. He suggests that Lowell had newly imagined “kinds of silence” that are “terrible challenges to the possibility of consolatory utterance.” “You don’t get the same feeling in Browning of contours of thought and feeling being shaped by the recipient in the way in which these tragically personal letters in Lowell are,” Ricks remarks. There is a “dramatic tautness in the letter” by virtue of its being so hard to reply to, such as when the Lizzie character writes, “I hope nothing is mis-said in this letter”:
Of course it’s imagining the receiving of the letter that’s the great stretch, not the writing. The good ones in Lowell are not ones emanating from him, they’re in letters arriving, so that the onus is on you to come up with something to say, and all you can come up with, say, is the re-working of the letter into poetry.99
* * *
Hardwick was at home in her apartment on West Sixty-Seventh Street on the afternoon of September 12, 1977, awaiting Lowell’s taxi from Kennedy Airport. “The elevator man called me and I went down,” she told a journalist from the Associated Press, where she found Lowell apparently asleep and unresponsive in the cab. She got in beside him and drove eight blocks south to Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at six o’clock. As the informant on his death certificate,100 Hardwick named his “surviving spouse” as Caroline Blackwood and described herself as a “friend.” She identified herself as “Elizabeth Lowell.” (“I go back and forth” between the two names, she had once written to Lowell, “as a commuter. Lowell to all the old trades, elevators, Castine, Harriet’s friends as her mother, some of mine—and then the Hardwick train of profession, women, students, readers. Neither seems quite to belong to me and alas they both have a deceptively rooted and solid sound for one so much a mutation in all stocks, all ‘roles’ to use the unmentionable word.”101) She tried to call Harriet with the news but had no change, and no one at the hospital would lend her a coin for the pay phone. She paid somebody ten dollars for a dime.102
When he died, Lowell was returning to Hardwick but was carrying in his arms a parcel wrapped in brown paper—“Girl in Bed,” a 1952 portrait of Blackwood painted by her former husband Lucian Freud. Lowell’s marriage to Blackwood was over, he had told friends the previous spring. Its end was initiated by Blackwood but accepted by Lowell, who saw the wisdom of the separation even after Blackwood changed her mind.103 His illness terrified her, and exacerbated her depression and her drinking. “It’s the effect my troubles have on you,” he had written to Blackwood that summer. “It’s like a nightmare we all have in which each motion of foot or hand troubles the turmoil it tries to calm.”104
Those times were “a great sadness” for him, Hardwick told Ian Hamilton.105 After Easter, he had “started coming down to New York” from Harvard, and with Hardwick’s measured acceptance eventually moved back into 15 West Sixty-Seventh Street, going between their old apartment and Hardwick’s studio. “She felt he was worthy of care,” Harriet Lowell recalls.106 In the summer, they went to Castine and spent the season there, also traveling to Russia together. Letters at the close of the present edition give Hardwick’s account to friends of what was going on. In one, she writes:
About my “situation”—the whole thing is astonishing and I have no idea exactly what the shape of it all will turn out to be. Cal is going to Ireland on the 1st of Sept. for two weeks, returning the 15th to teach at Harvard. They appear to be friendly from calls and letters and I think Caroline will make an effort again to mend her too hasty surgery on the marriage. Who knows? As for me, I spoke of the astonishment, by which I mean as clearly as I can say that I don’t feel vulnerable, don’t feel sent out on approval, as it were, don’t talk or care about contracts and commitments, whatever those are. It is very odd—we are just going along, having a very agreeable time. […] I know this sounds strange, but as the thing has gone along day by day it seems real just as it is. Cal and I burst out laughing on July 28th—had it not been for the “gap” we would have been married that day for 28 years.107
Lowell’s visit to Blackwood in Ireland was an unhappy one—he telephoned Hardwick on September 11 to say it was “sheer torture”108—and he flew back to New York on the twelfth, three days earlier than expected.
LOCATION OF MANUSCRIPTS
Robert Lowell was first approached by W. H. Bond, librarian of the Houghton Library at Harvard University, to sell his papers in 1966, “but Lowell felt uncertain and the matter was allowed to drop for four years,” writes Rodney G. Dennis.1 The letters in the present edition document what happened once the idea was again raised by Elizabeth Hardwick. Hardwick was thinking not only of the literary and financial value of the papers but also of protecting their daughter, Harriet Lowell, from having to sort through them after the deaths of her parents. In Lowell’s absence at Oxford, Hardwick arranged for the papers to be organized and assessed. After three years of negotiations, Lowell sold them to the Houghton in 1973. The sale comprised his “family and literary correspondence generated before 1971 and literary manuscripts covering a period of about thirty-five years, beginning with school poems and ending with Notebook.” It also included eighty letters written by Hardwick to Lowell and to others, and 168 letters from various correspondents written solely to Hardwick.
After Lowell’s death in 1977, his remaining papers (written during his years with Caroline Blackwood) “were placed at Harvard on deposit,” says Dennis. “The library was offered first refusal.” But the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin (HRC) “made an offer that Harvard could not match.”2 In 1982, the HRC came to an agreement with the Lowell Estate to buy the late manuscripts (including those for Lowell’s last four books), together with his correspondence between 1970 and 1977. A selection of twelve letters, telegrams, and cards from Hardwick to Lowell was included in the sale.
Left out of the sale were 101 letters, telegrams, and postcards from Hardwick to Lowell, one letter from Hardwick to Blackwood, and Lowell’s 1970 calendar, all of which Blackwood had previously set aside and mailed to Frank Bidart, Lowell’s literary executor, on April 25, 1978. Bidart kept them in his apartment until 1988, when he deposited them at the Houghton Library, with a note explaining that they were the property of Lowell’s Estate. “In the event of my death, they are to be returned to Caroline Blackwood, who entrusted them to me for safekeeping. If at that time Caroline Blackwood is dead, they are to be kept here at the Houghton Library until the death of Elizabeth Hardwick—at which time, they are to be returned to the Estate of Robert Lowell.”3 Blackwood died on February 14, 1996. Hardwick died on December 2, 2007. In May 2010, Bidart informed Evgenia Citkowitz (Blackwood’s daughter) and Harriet of the existence of the letters. They are currently on deposit at the Houghton Library.
In 1991, the HRC separately agreed to buy from Hardwick her own papers, including “seven boxes of creative works, correspondence, printed material, articles and photographs,” together with all of Lowell’s letters to Harriet and to her.
* * *
Letters in this edition are mostly housed at three repositories: the Houghton Library; the Elizabeth Hardwick Papers at the HRC (all letters from Lowell to Hardwick and Harriet); and the Robert Lowell Papers at the HRC (twelve letters and telegrams from Hardwick to Lowell, and all letters from Blackwood to Lowell). Letters from Mary McCarthy to Hardwick are in the Vassar College Archives & Special Collections Library and the HRC. All other incoming letters to Hardwick and to
Lowell in this edition are at the HRC. The locations of outgoing letters are as follows:
Robert Giroux to Charles Monteith
Archives and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library
Hardwick to Elizabeth Bishop
Vassar College Special Collections Library
Hardwick to Blair Clark
Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin
Hardwick to Ian Hamilton
Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin
Hardwick to Harriet Lowell
Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin
Hardwick to Mary McCarthy
Vassar College Special Collections Library
Lowell to William Alfred
Brooklyn College Library Archives and Special Collections
Lowell to Frank Bidart
Houghton Library, Harvard University
Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop
Vassar College Special Collections Library
Lowell to Blair Clark
Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin
Lowell to Stanley Kunitz
Firestone Library, Princeton University
Lowell to Harriet Lowell
Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin
Lowell to Mary McCarthy
Vassar College Special Collections Library
Lowell to Adrienne Rich
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
Charles Monteith to Robert Giroux
Archives and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library
Robert Silvers to Lowell
Archives and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library
A NOTE ON THE TEXT AND ANNOTATION
Transcriptions are of primary sources except in a few noted instances, when I have had to rely on published versions.1 Lowell and Hardwick typed most of their letters; any that were handwritten are noted as such.
Dates, addresses, and forms of address (given here in italics: Mrs. Robert Lowell, Professor William Alfred, etc.) are recorded when written or typed by the letter-writer on the letter or envelope. Dates and addresses gleaned from postmarks or from biographical or other sources are given in square brackets.
The pattern of dates (American or British) is not standardized but follows the practice of the writer or publication.
Except where noted, misspelled names and typos have been silently corrected, and any letter-writer’s revisions for the sake of grammatical sense have been silently accepted. Significant revisions, marginal additions, and interjections are marked by sloping lines for insertions/ or the use of strikethroughs. Punctuation has been faithfully preserved, but punctuation typos (overstrikes, for example) have been silently corrected.
Editorial omissions have been marked with ellipses in square brackets […] to distinguish them from Hardwick’s or Lowell’s own ellipses (…), which they used to break off, drift, fall silent, or for other effects.
In the footnotes, quotations from poems are run-on, with line breaks indicated by a vertical bar (|) to distinguish them from this edition’s convention of using sloping lines/ to signal marginal insertion.
Annotations provide information: personal identifications (supplemented by the Index), the contexts of Hardwick’s prose and Lowell’s poems and prose, and their reading. I have also taken care to annotate what might be common knowledge on one side of the Atlantic but not the other (for instance, the SSAT, the American tax date, or such phrases as “forty acres and a mule” for readers abroad; or the eleven-plus, grammar schools, and O levels for readers unfamiliar with the British school system).
References to Lowell’s poems and Hardwick’s prose are to the first published editions, unless otherwise stated. For Lowell’s “The Dolphin” manuscript (1972), refer to The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972–1973. Individual book titles are given in full, except for the following abbreviations for the three editions of Lowell’s Notebook:
Notebook 1967–68, first edition, published in 1969:
Notebook69-1
Notebook 1967–68, second printing, published in 1969:
Notebook69-2
Notebook, new edition, published in 1970:
Notebook70
In bibliographical citations, titles and year of publication are given in the first instance; titles alone are given thereafter. Citations of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) are mostly to the 1933 edition (or the supplements published in 1933, 1972, and 1976), which Hardwick and Lowell would have known. In some instances, the OED’s online definitions and quotations for the third edition are given.
Many sonnets in the Notebook editions, History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin, are gathered in sequences. In such cases, titles of individual poems are given in quotation marks, followed by the italicized sequence title and number in square brackets, thus: “Plane Ticket” [Flight to New York 1], The Dolphin.
Scholars who wish to consult the original letter manuscripts should apply to the Houghton Library for further information.
At the request of the Lowell Estate, the following letters silently omit references or passages that violate the privacy of families or living persons: Hardwick to Lowell, April 26 [1970]; Hardwick to Lowell, March 9, 1972; Lowell to Harriet Lowell, June 28, 1972; Lowell to Hardwick, March 5, 1973; Hardwick to Lowell, March 31, 1973; Lowell to Hardwick [April 4, 1973]; Lowell to Hardwick, April 5 [1973]; Hardwick to Lowell, April 9, 1973; Hardwick to Lowell, April 21, 1973; Hardwick to Lowell, May 5, 1973; Lowell to Hardwick, June 23, 1973; Hardwick to Lowell, July 20, 1974; Hardwick to Lowell, November 20, 1974; Hardwick to Lowell, September 19, 1975; Lowell to Hardwick, October 1, 1975.
TABLE OF DATES, 1970–1977
Outlining publications, travels, and major personal and world events alluded to in the letters.
1970
JANUARY–FEBRUARY—Lowell is on leave from teaching at Harvard University and continues to make revisions to the page proofs of Notebook, postponing its publication. He writes “1970 New Year.” Harriet Lowell turns thirteen on January 4. Hardwick teaches at Barnard College. Lowell’s planned trip to Russia is cancelled “at the last minute” due to the Soviet Union blocking a visa for Olga Andreyev Carlisle, his co-translator of Osip Mandelstam’s poems. Hardwick publishes an article on Jerzy Grotowski and the Polish Laboratory Theatre in The New York Review of Books, and a review of the film adaptation of Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? for Vogue. MARCH—Lowell turns fifty-three on March 1. Lowell accepts Elizabeth Bishop’s National Book Award on her behalf. Lowell, Hardwick, and Harriet Lowell leave for Italy on March 18, visiting Florence, Venice, and Rome. APRIL—The family spends the final six days of their holiday in Rome. Hardwick and Harriet return to New York. Lowell travels to Amsterdam. Lowell begins fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, on April 24. Lowell begins affair with Caroline Blackwood on April 30 in her house at 80 Redcliffe Square, Chelsea, London. MAY—U.S. invasion of Cambodia. Students protesting the invasion are killed at Kent State University and Jackson State College. JUNE—Working with Caroline Blackwood, Lowell finishes revisions to Notebook, which includes new sonnets written since March, “Left Out of Vacation” [February and March 12]; “Letter with Poems for a Letter with Poems” [For Elizabeth Bishop 3]; “America from Oxford”; and “Wall-Mirror” [To Summer 17]. Blair Clark meets Lowell and Hardwick in London on or about June 14 and discusses the options of telling Hardwick “it’s true” indirectly or directly.1 Lowell telegraphs Hardwick on June 20 that he will not be returning as expected. Lowell telephones Hardwick and Harriet on June 23 to say he is staying in Britain for the summer. Hardwick learns on June 25 that Lowell is seeing Blackwood. Hardwick drives Harriet to camp in Cornwall, Connecticut, on June 28. JULY—Hardwick publishes “A Useful Critic,” a letter to the editor of The New York Review of Books defending Richard Gilman from an attack by Philip Rahv. She spends Fourth of July weekend in Connecticut, driv
es Harriet back to New York for school interviews, and then drives her back to camp. Lowell locks himself and Blackwood in one of the flats in her Redcliffe Square house for three days. Lowell is admitted to Greenways Nursing Home on July 8. Blackwood departs. Hardwick drives from New York to Maine on July 12. Blackwood turns thirty-nine on July 16, and is in Ballyconneely, Ireland, on July 17. On July 20, Hardwick and Blair Clark discuss the need for someone from Lowell’s American circle to go to London to look after him (since they felt that, excepting Grey Gowrie, Xandra Bingley, and Jonathan Miller, few of his British friends had an understanding of his illness and its patterns). Hardwick asks Clark if he will go, but she cautions that they “can’t do anything until he gets over this manic phase.” On July 21, Blackwood is back in London. Robert Silvers tells Clark that Lowell had left the hospital and shown up at Blackwood’s house. “Car[oline] can’t stand it.” Clark is urged by Jonathan Miller to come to England because everyone Lowell knows in London “is vanishing, including himself,” and he is “troubled by the idea of Cal emerging” from the hospital “with no point of real contact.” On July 22, Silvers tells Clark that “Caroline is closing house in London—vanishing concerned that he not track her down—Car[oline] quotes ‘I can’t take responsibility’ but ‘hasn’t thought through what ought to happen ultimately.’” On July 23, Clark speaks to Mary McCarthy, who says that Clark will have to go to London eventually. She says Lowell “is quite mad but [it is] masked by lithium—with lithium, he may stay up forever & never reach a manic climax.” McCarthy also says that “Lizzie seems O.K.—certain euphoria (60%) about living alone.” Hardwick turns fifty-four on July 27. Hardwick and Lowell’s twenty-first anniversary falls on July 28. On July 29, Hardwick tells Clark she has heard the “most appalling news from London,” that Lowell is “allowed to go out—in pyjamas—out to pubs,” and that Sonia Orwell told her he “steals from handbags.” Hardwick is especially alarmed by the reports of stealing, which he “had never done before,” and that “he might keel over dead, with drugs and beer.” Says that “he is a brilliant, proud, dignified man,” “not this detached idiot,” and that he is “not in emotional contact with his real personality (reserved and proud).” She has “made up [her] mind” to go to London with William Alfred, who will “go to pub, cut his hair, buy him shoes—until they can control him—sit there with him.” “Car[oline] thing is secondary—he can marry her if he wants.” AUGUST—Hardwick publishes review of Francine du Plessix Gray in Vogue. Hardwick and William Alfred leave for London via Boston, arriving on August 2. Hardwick later tells Clark that “the A.M. I arrived Car[oline] called & told Dr. under no circs. can I take him” home. Hardwick wonders if “maybe Car[oline] had some shame about neglecting him?” Hardwick says to the doctor, “What kind of love [is it] where you say ‘you can’t be sick.’” Hardwick and Alfred visit Lowell in the hospital daily, cut his hair “back to its usual poetic length,” take clothes to the laundry, walk with him to a pub called the “George Washington,” “both holding him up,” take him to the movies. Hardwick had “one outburst against Cal”—“when he taunted me, I hit back, ‘I’m not a nurse.’” Lowell “said he didn’t want divorce” but also “doesn’t seem to have any intention of coming back.” Hardwick and Alfred return to the United States on August 7. “All 3 were weeping as taxi left.” Blackwood returns to London. On August 9, Hardwick tells Clark that “he is still in hosp. Very glad I went—everything Sonia & others mentioned wrong,” including the stealing story. Hardwick said Lowell was an “absolute invalid,” “very drugged & hardly able to get across street.” “He can hardly write, writing a few poems (they’re all right).” “Cal back in touch with Caroline, my coming did that.” Hardwick also said “Let this cup pass from me.” “I don’t want to know, day by day. Going to make a terrific effort to put Cal out of my mind.” Hardwick drives to Connecticut to pick up Harriet from camp on 15/16 August, and they return to Castine. Hardwick and Harriet travel to Quebec. Six new Notebook sonnets are published in Modern Occasions. Lowell is released from hospital, hoping to stay in Redcliffe Square, but at Blackwood’s insistence looks for his own studio. SEPTEMBER—Hardwick publishes review of Mary McCarthy’s The Writing on the Wall in Vogue. Lowell moves into a studio at 33 Pont Street in Belgravia, London. Hardwick and Harriet return to New York over Labor Day weekend. Harriet starts the eighth grade at Dalton School. Hardwick is active in Democratic Party politics. Hardwick publishes essay about Zelda Fitzgerald in The New York Review of Books. OCTOBER—Lowell begins to teach at the University of Essex. Hardwick publishes a review of Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat in Vogue. NOVEMBER—Publication of Notebook. Hardwick publishes a review of Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, in Vogue. DECEMBER—Lowell flies to New York’s Kennedy Airport on December 14, where Hardwick meets him. He gets off the plane wearing a ring given to him by Blackwood. Lowell, Hardwick, and Harriet celebrate Christmas at 15 West Sixty-Seventh Street.
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 Page 3
