The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979
Page 29
With Love,
Elizabeth
212. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop
[Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent]
April 24, 1972
Dearest Elizabeth:
I seem to have left your last letter and poem (much turned to) in London, (I almost wrote New York) in a coat left there for another taken. I can’t be as accurate as I’d like. The picture poem and the dentist one are in the clearest of narrative styles, of the best short stories … if quite a long one could be written on a page.284 The picture is more mysterious—when the R.A. turns up I still jump—your relative seemed more of a failure than that—then you see the painting is good enough, that the poem is a life, yours, his, going to age.285 I want to see more of these poems. I’m sure they roll up, a huge story maybe like “In the Village,” gaining in what can be held on to, in graspableness by being poetry.286
Kunitz has similar reservations about Dolphin. But don’t say this; everything seems to get back to Lizzie. There must be heavy changes. But Peter Taylor, a kind soul, has seen my revised Dolphin and saw nothing wrong, except that it needed to be read with the earlier poems about Lizzie and Harriet. I think I’ve at last turned the thing, though there’s still file-work.
I’ll be in New York the week beginning the 21st of May. Will you still be in North America?
From the shattering strength of your letters and your skiing, you are in huge health. Never more force! I hope to get back to tennis, but skiing—the last time I tried about eighty years ago during the war, I failed to stop on a low mound when my skis stopped and fell on my head with my thumb under a ski—broken. Do you believe in Woman Power? I do, the shadow at the end of history. However my son feels the opposite, has broken a kitchen chair, shovels everything (rugs, blankets, silver toys, the little dachshund, Caroline and my fingers) into his two tooth mouth. Our family of women braces itself.
Dear, how I hope you’ll still [be] in Cambridge!
Love,
Cal
213. Robert Lowell to Stanley Kunitz
[Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent]
April 24, 1972
Dear Stanley:
I have meant to do something about your book, but had the impression that Witness (bad slip) Testing Tree287 had been to Faber. However my editor Charles Monteith knows about you and is unaware of having been sent Tree. I’m mailing both book and my review this morning. I should have acted ages ago, but the winter has been outwardly troubled and somber for us. Now full spring weather, Ivana back at school, Sheridan eating everything in sight: blanket, rug, small dog, our fingers—a microcosm of James Dickey but on the wagon. Lovely.
About your criticism.288 I expect to be back in New York for a week beginning the 21st of May, and hope to unwind over drinks with you. Dolphin is somewhat changed with the help of Elizabeth Bishop. The long birth sequence will come before the “Flight to New York,” a stronger conclusion, and one oddly softening the effect by giving a reason other than new/ love for my departure. Most of the letter poems—E. B’s objection they were part fiction offered as truth—can go back to your old plan, a mixture of my voice, and another voice in my head, part me, part Lizzie, italicized,/ paraphrased, imperfectly, obsessively heard. I take it, it is these parts that repel you/. I tried the new version out on Peter Taylor, and he/ couldn’t imagine any moral objection to Dolphin. Not that the poem, alas,/ from its donnée, can fail to wound. For Harriet and Lizzie doesn’t go with History, it goes before Dolphin, but I thought it was too sensational, confessing, to bring the two books out together. I think you are right, tho,/ and I’ll do something. History somehow relates echoes/ and stands aside from the other books. Do you think I could comb out enough excrescencies from History to do much good? The metal too often reforged wears out. Maybe you could put your finger on a few of the worst. It must be as good almost as I can will/ make it.
How are you and Elise? I have sort of a feeling from your letters that this has been a much healthier winter. You can’t picture our complicated ménage. One thing we’ve discovered, Never employ men, they are forever trying to surpass themselves and everyone else.
Love to you and Elise,
Cal
* * *
Thankyou as ever for giving so much time and kindness.
214. Frank Bidart to Robert Lowell
[2 Ware Street, Apt. 508, Cambridge, Mass.]
April 30, 1972
Dear Cal,
I’ve just re-read Dolphin in the new order. Let me re-state this new order, in case I have misunderstood: “Sickday,” then all the sections of “Burden” (from “Knowing” through “Robert Sheridan”), then “Leaving America for England,” “Before Womean,” “Flight to New York” (from “Fox-Fur” through “Christmas 1970”), then “Dolphin.”
To my immense depression, I don’t think it works. On the level of “plot,” of course, it does—but it drastically changes the meaning and resonance of a great many of the sections, and ultimately of the whole book.
Lizzie, for example, simply would not write a letter like “The Messiah” after Sheridan’s birth. Knowing about Sheridan, it seems far more pathetic of her to say “I long to see|your face and hear your voice and take your hand.” She doesn’t seem “restful and gracious,” but far more desperate than in the original order. Similarly, she can’t later say “I cannot tell you|the things we planned for you this Christmas season” (plans she had to abandon) if she had known from the beginning you would probably return to England.
But far more important, one’s sense of where you are in the drama, and thus of the emotional meaning and resonance of so many of the lines, is thrown out of whack. It’s hard to pinpoint this in specific lines (though I’ll try). The whole “Burden” section breathes a kind of emotional resolution that seems to say you have been through all the alternatives; the lines have a resonance and rhetorical weight which feel like the end of a poem:
It’s happy to find love with you at last,
now death has become an ingredient of my being:
bloodclot and hemorrhage, today, tomorrow,
like Mother and Father, their youth struck dead at sixty;
I have saved their blood, and hand it on.…289
Without “Flight to New York” preceding this, the sense of resolution comes too abruptly; in the original, there is the sense that you have fought through much more to get here. Even more frustratingly, in the new order, after “Burden” one goes back to the relative bewilderment and emotional thinness (with respect to the relationship with Caroline) of “Flight to New York”:
a feeling,
not wholly happy, of having been reborn.290
Surely, it was a great joy
blaming ourselves and wanting to do wrong.291
There’s nothing wrong with these lines, except that they seem inadequate, even a little unfelt, after the intensity and complexity of “Burden”. I don’t feel you would have written them in this order.
For me, the whole ending of the book went out of focus. After the birth of Sheridan, it’s hard to know what the flight to New York means to you; in the original, because the relationship with Caroline at this point is so much less resolved, there is the sense that you have to go back to New York to see if anything is left. (And Caroline feels the threat—e.g., “Departure at the Air Terminal”.) This seems largely gone in the new version—even Lizzie has acknowledged it (she has already told Caroline that Harriet “knows she will seldom see him”292). The whole process of going back, implicitly searching for something and not finding it (especially in “No Messiah” and “Sleepless”), now has much less force, much less pathos.
It’s true, as you say in your letter, that in the original order the birth of Sheridan comes to have a tremendous symbolic weight—one wonders if any child can mean the “death-fight” fought throughout the book is over. But for all the reasons I’ve been trying to give—especially in sections like “Morning Away From You,” where the sense o
f resolution and happiness is bound up with feeling the “ingredient” of your own death—Sheridan’s birth doesn’t have to do all the work. If there is a problem here (and it doesn’t bother me) I don’t see that the new order satisfyingly solves it.
Also, the seasons get terribly confused. After the “summer” sections early in the book, Sheridan is born; can “Christmas” then be the first Christmas after you have gone to England? Somehow, in the new version, one still feels it is the first Christmas; but then all the emotions, turmoil and sense of emotional resolution in “Burden” happen in the nfew months of fall after the “summer” poems. They then seem too abrupt—it trivializes them. If “Christmas” is a full year and a half after the “summer” sections, it seems too far away. I’m not saying at all that one consciously counts the months when reading the poem—just that something seems disjointed about the passage of the seasons. I miss the suffocating uncertainty and intensity of Christmas after the vacillation, the pain of the fall, followed by nine months of pregnancy, where a kind of order and peace is slowly found again.
The abruptness of “Burden” after “Flight to New York” (Elizabeth’s worry) just doesn’t bother me. Perhaps in the title of this section you could make it clear you’re back in England (though the poem is clearly addressed to “Caroline”). In fact, I like this abruptness—the poem isn’t a chronicle, and after the departure from New York the next crucial event, through which all of your conflicting emotions begin to be worked out, is the fact of293
215. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
May 6, 1972
Dearest Lizzie:
I don’t think I am going to be able to make the trip this spring. Ivana sometime soon is going to have another operation. One of her grafts has grown tight and woodlike, so that she has to bend when she walks, and has pains. We hoped to put this off for a year, but it now seems unlikely. It’s not a major operation, but a tense and painful one.
Also the other day when we were driving to Maidstone in a taxi, a car about twenty feet in front and going in the opposite direction turned without looking into a filling station on our side of the road—that awful few slow seconds when you know you’ll—and we hit. No injuries except I soon had a huge lump on my shin. It will last far into summer, but is not dangerous or painful. I still feel shaken.
I’ve talked to Stephen Spender who brought me good news of you and Harriet’s visit. Has her French tour come off? She might, as I so wish, stop off here, either going or coming. I dearly wish I could come to New York very soon. I trust my nerves though saying “don’t.”/ My teaching schedule will be improved (less work for less pay) and I will teach four days a month all at once in sequence./ So I will be free to fly almost any time in the fall, avoiding the steam and rush of September.
Michael Henshaw who manages my taxes etc. will shortly be in New York and will call on you about the Harvard papers. Anything reasonable will suit me. I do want to end life financially independent. I suppose Henshaw is too “rough diamond.”
Good times with the Brookses and Taylors. Talk sightseeing etc. The Taylors have seen so much, they are ready to drop from fatigue over-knowledge/, yet no one can discover which of the family drives them on and on. I was nearly killed by both Peters independently, looking to the left when they should look right. I don’t think I’d last a day driving in England.
Good remarks of yours about “autobiography[.]” In the best art, as in life, all the blood-veins go to the heart.
All my love,
Cal
* * *
P.S. The Brontës is one of your best portraits.294 Very superior to the New Wuthering Heights I saw In Maidstone.295 Excited to read your whole book.
216. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
May 6, 1972
Darling Harriet:
As I have just written Mother, I don’t think I can make New York this spring. Ivana will soon have to have another operation, not dangerous but tense and grueling. She has already outgrown one of her important grafts, and walks stooped.
I will write you in slightly more detail than I wrote Mother about our car accident. We had slipped off a mid-Sunday afternoon to an adults only Maidstone/ crime movie, after twice narrowly missing death with Peter Taylor and Peter Brooks, neither of whom understood English left side driving. A taxi man was driving us, one of the safest. Suddenly about the length of the big parlor in your apartment, a car (not American!) and going in the opposite direction, turned fully across the road ahead. For a forever of fifteen (?) seconds I saw us in slow motion about to hit. Not a thing I could do. My whole life didn’t pass before my imagination, no brilliant deep thoughts, no blood-gush of new compassion—I did stretch my arms in front of Caroline to break her fall. The cars hit and stopped with wrinkled fenders, I felt a small pain in my shin, and saw a slight scratch. Threequarters through the crimefilm (full of accidents much like ours) I felt a stretching tight of my leg-skin and some pain. I touched my leg, and found a bump like a second knee on the side of my leg. The bump will bulge for a long time, but doesn’t hurt much and isn’t dangerous. It’s handy to persuade people to fetch my things like a cigarette lighter.
Now I will certainly be home in the fall. I wonder—we beg you—to consider stopping off here a few days on your European circuit. Sheridan has just had a terrible half-hour of taking a bath with Genia and her friend Kay, both saying “you are so manly.” A few days ago, he mistook (?) Bosun’s ear for a blanket, and might have eaten him—so Bosun says. I think he needs your mature touch. So do I.
All my love,
Daddy
217. Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
May 15, 1972
Dear Frank:
I’ve neglected answering because I was waiting for your History notes, and also because I imagined it I would soon be in America. But Ivana will have to have another operation in the next few weeks, and the time doesn’t seem very fortunate with Lizzie before the divorce gets planned.
Your remarks on Dolphin are too profound and detailed for me to handle them in a letter. Besides you would have to see the new text before we would have our feet on the earth. The thing is I must shift the structure and somehow blunt and angle the letters. The new structure, with the alteration of a few lines here and there, seems a big improvement to me. I had meant to end with The Flight to New York sequence, even after R.S.’s birth conception, but feared I would be lying. Now The “departure” is the real, though not chronological ending; it will of course seem to be both the real and chronological ending because I place it at the end—not from anything I say. Sophistry? No, not entirely. this This/ is the real truth of the story and is in a way happening again now. The letters are not really changed to improve—the most I can hope is to lose nothing … to both lose and gain. I do think Elizabeth is mostly right, though is peculiarly (almost unintelligibly) sensitive to private exposure. Her letter to me was as powerful criticism as I’ve ever gotten—usually she writes me about this phrase or that.
Affectionately,
Cal
* * *
P.S. What can we say of the War! Sorry you’ve been ill. We’ve had a rather hard winter; it’s better now.
218. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
June 1, 1972
Dear Cal: I tried to phone you on this urgent, perplexing matter. Here it is. Starting in Feb. I wrote Michael Henshaw that we needed simple material for the 1971 income tax, the year ending Dec. 31, 1971. He never answered and then I wrote again and he said that he was coming in May, early. I wrote back that we had to file on April 15th; he wrote back saying we should get an extension until June 15th. I wrote back saying that was a bit risky—pay interest on months beyond April 15, have more and more meetings, quite expensive, with my accountant, make an audit mo
re likely and I am not really in good shape for an audit since I’ve had to “improvise” expenses, etc., these last years. But we asked for the extension. No Henshaw; two cables, no answer. Here it is now June 1, weekend will pass; I will be going away the 15th. All of this is very, very distressing and quite frightening to me.
I told Henshaw I did not need any money because I have it from what you gave me the year before. All I really must have are the earnings, deductions, English taxes paid on Essex Jan. 1971–Dec. 31, 1971 and a listing of miscellaneous earnings, a few readings, Ashley Famous.296 Very simple./
As for this year, that is another matter. I hope we will be legally separated by the end of Dec. and in that case you will do your own American earnings taxes—royalties, I think also/ you list what you give Harriet and me but I pay the taxes. However until then I have been paying or will, when I get the information, the estimated 1972 tax for both, which we will adjust later. You would have to pay it to three sources quarterly otherwise. Actually you’ll have to get a tax man for here.
But all I need now are the records for the year well gone by. Cal, if you can’t get Henshaw you must ask Essex to mail the day—airmail—you get this letter the records for the year 1971, starting Jan. ending Dec. And send a few other statistics, like a few readings. I can get in terrible trouble here, fines, months of investigation, trouble for signing your name, etc. I must get this before June 12th and so it must be acted on immediately.
Harriet is marvelous, taking exams now and next week. She will go to Washington, Connecticut[,] with me and in July go to Choate School297 for a summer program—boys and girls in dorms, studying things they are interested in. She’s taking “Choate Film Institute”—and maybe something else, history. This is just for fun. We couldn’t begin to afford the Europe trip and both of us have the electoral frenzy and wouldn’t want to be away this summer in any case. I am having a good time, feel wonderful. Will give a lecture at Harvard Summer School (that does not contribute to my “wonderful,” but I guess I’ll get through it). Esther and Dixey298 were here and will be coming back. Everyone is very well that I know about. Your studio has at last been dismantled; the books go out today as soon as I get up to the dust infested upper reaches here and move everything to make room for your books. Was up in Maine last week to open up my house for tenants. The town was shining and blue-sparkling, house and barn lovely, grassy, sunny. The Thomases very well. I don’t mind not goin[g] up, though. It is too far and Connecticut, going back and forth a good deal from the city, sunning, writing, having friends visit is just what I want. Love,