The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  I thought of doing this. It’s just a sketch, because I’ve really only had yesterday to read through The Dolphin, and scribble and sketch. First, the entire “Burden” section should come after “Sickday,” after “Burden” come “Leaving America,” and “Lost Fish,” then all the “To New York” (new title).261 This leaves rough edges, and falsifies the actual time sequence, but gets rid of the rather callous happy ending, and softens E’s role in the New York group—she seems rather serenely gracious (I overstate) about my visit after the birth. I can go this far, but won’t bring any post facto business about the baby into the New York section. Two, I take your moral objections are confined to the letters, and not to all of them. Several can be handled and perhaps improved by using some of the lines in italics, and giving the rest, somewhat changed, to me. From my Wife would be called “Voice.”262 Other poems do not need change maybe. “Fox Fur” and “The Messiah” become gentler when the reader assumes the child is born.

  This is a sketch and not exactly what I’ll do. The problem of making the poem unwounding is impossible, still I think it can be made noticeably milder without losing its life. It might be much better, for who can want to savage a thing. How can I want to hurt? Hurt Lizzie and Harriet, their loving memory? Working my poem out is a must somehow, not avoidable even though I/ fail—as I must partially.

  What are your plans? I hope to come to New York for a week at the end of May. I wish I could talk to you face to face about this and everything. The cloud of winter seems to have lifted.

  Love,

  Cal

  207. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

  [15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]

  April 9, 1972

  Dear Cal: Harriet had a nice visit and came home in good shape, slept for a couple of days almost and now is back at school. New York is alive, sunny chill today, rainy warmth tomorrow. Last week was under the unbearable cloud of the death of Jack’s son, Peter, in an automobile accident.263 Jack’s life has been built upon catastrophic losses in childhood, and now this. I believe he is all right, but I worry about him. He hadn’t been doing the distressing drinking for sometime and so that is a help—or I hope it is.

  One thing I wanted to say to you—rather difficult, but I will try. It seems that agitation about your book has come up again among your friends. I haven’t seen any of the poems based on my letters and I know nothing about the book,264 but I feel a little sad by the vigor of the defense of me and even somewhat bewildered by the terms of it as I understand it. I don’t know what you should or should not do, but it seems to me that you have been writing for thirty years and publishing for nearly the same number. The matter of your work is yours entirely and I don’t think you have it in your power to “hurt” me. I suppose that is something I control since the feelings are mine and perhaps my feelings are not as simple as my friends think. I mean that I cannot see what harm can come to me from a poem by you. Why should I care? The credit or discredit is entirely yours. I don’t see any of this as having anything to do with me in the long run. I just wanted to “go on record” in this. It is certainly a wearisome business by now and I feel strongly that you should do what you wish. I went to Princeton last week with Hannah to hear Nathalie Sarraute. She, N.S., made a deep impression of the most exhilarating kind on me. Very handsome, elegant English, utterly strange and intense ideas of the novel. “You see, I do not believe in zese characters. Zee miser?265 He ees impossible! No?” Last night I had dinner at a friend’s house with Elliott Carter and Charles Rosen—most fantastic conversation about Rousseau’s Confessions and someone’s ideas—a French scholar—that he fabricated the whole thing about sending his children to an orphanage, and even about the existence of the children.266 I got up this morning looking for the Confessions and have found an old copy.

  Englishmen are coming here as we are going to you in England. Alvarez is coming or may already be here. I think I will go to the publishing party for him,267 the strange little shark. I have always liked him, but somehow one must be prepared not to like him I suppose.

  Another thing—May is looming up as a very busy and inconvenient time for me. In June it will be hot, as you feared, and I think you’d do well to stay at home then. I don’t know how much importance you give to the visit, or how much difference it makes about my own plans—I mean I know you are coming to see friends, publishers, etc. But I am not sure I can spare my studio at the end of May. We can talk further about it, sometime. It isn’t all that near.

  I must sign off. Love, from here

  Lizzie

  208. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy

  [15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]

  April 9, 1972

  Dearest Mary: To have your own typed letter made me very happy because it meant you were well again.268 Thank heaven it is over. Your courage through it all shouldn’t surprise but yet it always does.

  New York is lovely today, cool and sunny. But what will tomorrow bring? I had the most exhilarating visit to Princeton with Hannah to hear Nathalie Sarraute. We were driven by a young pansy named, wrongly, Mr. Bland,269 who is Hannah’s secretary at [the] New School. “I share him with Jonas!”270 I feel in love with N.S.—first her presence, the little wing of grey-black hair falling over the right spectacles, her beautiful English, and the elegant intensity, turning page after page of her lecture, looking up slyly. I was gasping with the pleasure of it. Question period: Hannah: “But when you take the invisible and put it into words then it is in the realm of ‘appearances,’ no?” N.S. “Not precisely.” Hannah closed in, circling, narrowing … finally, N.S. “Ah, as always you are too clever for me,”—sly little smile … We are going back next Thursday, motored by the wild Bland. Even though I teach all day and will have left home at nine to return at midnight the chance, the pleasure are too great to miss.

  I hate the idea too of not being in Castine. Mostly because of you, but also I love the whole place. It is very inconvenient, expensive, difficult for me alone. I go up late May to finish the opening—terrible costly/ airplane, rental car expense—and Harriet gets nothing from it during vacations or in the summer. I have no plans about it. Just as soon as my tenants leave in August I will abandon Olga’s house and come up until school starts. I don’t know how long they will stay, but perhaps they won’t stay all of August. I hope not. And I do plan on Jim touring you to Washington, Conn., to visit me. (When I said I had no plans about it, I meant about selling it. The chance to see you and Jim can hardly be weighed against anything else, alas.)

  Oh, Cal’s book.271 Yes, I guess that is agitating friends again. I haven’t read any of the letter-poems, but I don’t care at all. The whole thing, Mary, seems to me to have that awful silliness about it—and to think it has been well over a year that Cal has held forth with his friends on the matter, everyone has read the “poems” and Olwyn Hughes even had the whole foolishness in page proof. I cannot imagine anyone else of Cal’s gift and thirty years of writing and publishing being sent telegrams, letters of plea about his work. (Lots of agitation from Bill Alfred, Esther Brooks.) I truly think Cal is in a half-mad state, one I know well, and which I think is his permanent condition. You can function quite well (yes, I like his Berryman piece very well272) and then again you do very foolish, self-loving things, marked by that hypo-manic inappropriateness of feeling. This whole thing is a sort of half-manic caper and always has been. He hasn’t the intention of “hurting” and hasn’t the intention of the reverse—that doesn’t enter in. He has some idea that there may be one person, reader, who needs to be informed of the background to the Caroline poems; without me he feels—foolishly I think—that it is “incomplete.” I feel very strongly that he has to take his own chances. I can’t see that I can be hurt. He will publish the whole thing someday. The one Bill Alfred read me over the phone was grotesquely bad, as a poem, and I confess I felt I was having some strange, unasked for revenge, instead of the other way around. I truly feel indifferent to it all. Credit or discr
edit is entirely his. I have written him that I don’t care a fig. I agree with what you said many months ago that his sanctimoniousness were he to refrain is worse than any “betrayal,” if that is what it is. I have the idea the second book Gaia mentioned … hold on … is a re-writing of Notebook, a re-arrangement, now called History! Do you see what I mean about his state of mind, poor old boor. I feel sad about that sort of happy dust273 he seems to get up and inject himself with every day, because he was once the most beautiful and interesting man. I can’t tell from letters and the phone perhaps but he seems repetitive, rather lacking in any kind of true moral concerns, rather a fallen angel.

  Harriet paid Cal/ a week’s visit. It went perfectly well. I haven’t questioned her too much, as I understand you aren’t “supposed to.”

  Much love. I can’t wait until some way of getting together in the summer. I am certainly coming to Paris the next time I go anywhere. Things look a little possible here politically and I guess we are all prepared to find that McGovern has “charisma” and whatever. I would do anything to get Nixon out. What can we do. All of us are full of hope however.

  Dearest greetings to you both,

  Lizzie

  209. Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell

  [Cambridge, Mass.]

  April 10th (Monday)? [1972]

  Dearest Cal:

  I have two letters from you here now—& I was so relieved to get the first one, especially—I was awfully afraid I’d been crude, rude, etc … Look—I do see how when you have written—one has written—an absolutely wonderful, or satisfactory, poem—it’s hard to think of changing anything … However, I think you’ve misunderstood me a little.

  I quoted Hardy exactly, & the point was that one can’t mix fact & fiction—What I have objected to in your use of the letters is that I think you’ve changed them—& you had no right to do that (?)

  * * *

  April 12th—

  Well, I was interrupted there and have stayed interrupted for two days, apparently … It was—is—as I was saying—the mixture of truth & fiction that bothers me. Of course, I don’t know anything about your possible agreements with E. about this, etc … and so I may be exaggerating terribly—

  To drop this painful subject and go on to the rest—I think the re-arrangements you are thinking of making will improve the last part of the poem enormously—and I see what a lot of hard work they entail, too. The idea of the italics and your saying some lines—sounds fine.

  I am so glad Harriet’s visit apparently went off so very well. After all, she has two very bright parents and so must have inherited a good deal of intelligence!

  I am getting read[y] to go to New York; the Brazilian anthology,274 or vol. I of it, is to be launched tomorrow at a huge, I gather, party, and I must be there. I don’t want to be especially, but must. This is no real answer to your letters—and thank you for being so frank about the poems—

  Just rec’d an ad for a book about you called “Everything to be Endured” …275

  I just wanted to get some reply to you in the mail before I left. I’ll be back the 17th or 18th and then I’ll write again. I even have some more of my niggling line-comments, too, if you can bear them. I read your Berryman piece with sadness—also wonder that you could do it all so fast and spontaneously. I have the new book here but haven’t had time really to study the poems yet.276 It is awful, but in general his religiosity doesn’t quite convince me—perhaps it couldn’t quite convince him, either … He says wonderful little things, in flashes—the glitter of broken glasses, smashed museum cases,—something like that.

  I am still struggling to put down all my Marianne Moore recollections.277 I’ve also done a couple of poems—one a pretty long one, still being furbished a bit—the first of this batch maybe I’ll enclose.278 It is very old-fashioned and umpty-umpty I’m afraid—but I’m grateful to get anything done these days and one usually starts me off on 2 or 3 more, with luck. Frank has also asked me for a blurb279 and I struggle with the phrases for that in between everything else. It is terribly hard. His poem280 is so personal, so conclusive—so definitive, almost (for Frank)—I don’t see where he can go after that, really. I wish he’d try something easier. He has such amazing taste and sensitivity about other people’s poetry … I wish he were a happier young man. I do think we’ve become very good friends, however. The Paz-es have also been very friendly and we had—I had—an Easter breakfast party—a great success, I think, with Frank doing [his] best at egg-dy[e]ing, and Octavio madly searching my bedroom and bathroom for eggs—all brand new to him. –these Easter rites–/

  It’s spring—first one I’ve seen in many years. I had one wonderful last skiing week-end in Stowe—unbroken fields & mountainsides of snow—and then back here where everything looks very bare and still brown—and the brick walks are still bleached white by all that salt they use in the winter.

  I’ll really write again as soon as I return. Elizabeth Cadwalader is arriving to vacuum my house, thank goodness—I hope you’re all well and that Robert Sheridan sits up & takes notice …

  With much love,

  Elizabeth

  210. Robert Lowell to Mr. Frank Bidart

  Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent

  April 10 [1972]

  Dear Frank:

  In the confusion of Harriet[’s] visit and the arrival of the Taylors, I have mislaid your letter—left it in London. So I start again from scratch.281 It’s important/, since I am your friend, to state the thing soberly. Blurbs tend to stiffen into honorary degree citations, a form, unlistenable, unbelievable, even when true. I think they exist to make reviewers seems intelligent and, natural and brilliant.

  Here goes:

  “/For three or four years, I haven’t forgotten the story and atmosphere of Frank Bidart’s California sequence; it is very painful, and moves in a dry,/ gruesome glare, heightened—perhaps this is my anti-Californian bias—by flashes of a modern “western”, when the gunslingers are fossils. Bidart’s poetry, unlike most, doesn’t distort or glaze or stand between the reader and the subject.”/

  I’ve read and long thought on Elizabeth’s letter. It’s a kind of masterpiece of criticism, though her extreme paranoia (For God’s sake don’t repeat this) about revelations gives it a wildness. Yet Most people will feel something of her doubts. The terrible thing isn’t the mixing of fact and fiction, but the wife pleading to her husband to return—this backed by “documents.” So far I’ve done this much: I) Most important—Shift Burden before Leaving America and Flight to New York. This strangely makes Lizzie more restful and gracious about the “departure.” I haven’t changed a word to this effect, but one assumes she knows about the baby’s birth. Burden now begins with Sickday, and I think gains much by the baby’s birth not being the climax. 2) Several of the early letters, From my Wife, are now cut up into “Voices” (often using such title) changing mostly pronouns/ as if I were speaking and paraphrasing or repeating Lizzie. Most of the later letters I haven’t been able to change much or all. 3) Changes for my wish and style, not to do with this business.

  Now the book must still be painful to Lizzie and won’t satisfy Elizabeth. As Caroline says, it can’t be otherwise with the book’s donnée. However, even fairly small changes make Lizzie much less a documented presence. A distinct, even idiosyncratic voice isn’t the same as some one, almost fixed as non-fictional/ evidence, that you could call on the phone. She dims slightly and Caroline and I somewhat lengthen. I know this doesn’t make much sense, but that’s the impression I get reading through the whole. Then Sheridan is somewhat a less forced and climactic triumph; as Ed.’s wrote/ problem of the/ getting back to England and into pregnancy is gone; and the very end of Flight, with the shark is less Websterian and Poeish.

  Harriet’s visit scared me to death naturally beforehand. But never have we been able to talk so easily. One age. Surprisingly, she both knew about and liked Blue Nun, Irish coffee and champagne. Then she and Caroline would argue w
ith me about socialism and women, both pitifully incoherent to a man/, especially Caroline, but to my delight agreeing.282 I want to get this off in the car, so will stop. Trust you’ll come sometime in June.

  Affectionately,

  Cal

  * * *

  Give my love to Elizabeth and Bill[.]

  211. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell

  [15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]

  April 21, 1972

  Dear Cal: My last letter probably sounded like a mood or a pose of some sort. The crazy thing is that it wasn’t. I have gone over my calendar for May. The only part of the month that I am free of deadlines, visitors, engagements is the week starting Sunday, May 21st. At that time I believe you could stay in your own old studio, the last week before it goes. That would be better for me because I work in my studio, the telephone there is connected with the main one in my apartment, and the whole thing is the only privacy I have. Also, last mention of your book. I was being quite genuine, not angry or ironical. Everyone has seen the poems, a manuscript or two must be floating around. I really don’t see, as I said, that it matters to me one way or another. We always think we are writing our autobiography, but life is not willing to tell assure/ us which part of ourselves is the main one, which action is telling and what it tells. In that way I guess it is folly to see your life as a book—and such a clue for clever people who come after us to try to pierce our defenses and let out the pus. I am writing something on this—in June!, such is the way I have to plan out everything—in connection with Robert Craft and Stravinsky.283

  Naturally, I am a little fearful of seeing you, of reawakening the great hurt that has at last subsided, thank God! I think you will find me more than a little ahead of where I was—I hope so. I started to say that if the week of the 21st didn’t suit Himself, then September. But I looked at the calendar, both of us start school the first week. And speaking of heat!