I have been reading some of Laforgue’s prose, which is marvelous. Wonderful essay on Baudelaire, another, rather miffed and brilliant, about Corbière.61 And The Notebooks of Malte Brigge again.62 How romantic and moving it is, how much of its time and its author.… Well, the end of the page … I wish we had seen more of you, but the last visit was a good health pleasure—your good health. So keep your pills straight and all will be well. God is good, sometimes.
Love,
Lizzie
313. Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell
[Telegram]
[Maidstone]
[Received June 6, 1975]
MISS HARRIET LOWELL 15 WEST67ST
NEWYORK
I HAVE ALMOST LIVED YOUR GRADUATION GRADUATED MYSELF IM SO PROUD AND GLAD LOVE TO YOU AND CATHY
DAD
314. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[Castine, Maine]
July 16, 1975
Dearest Cal: Looking out on the foggy bay, heavy sky with a sort of curtain of light behind it. The lawn has just been cut, the golf club rummage sale looms for the morning. It is beautiful here and my house is so pretty, warm, bright red and mustard colored inside, and so naturally warm from the high ground. I must say I love it with too much passion. Mary arrived in Bangor Friday, her maid arrived in Bangor Saturday, Jim arrives in two weeks (in Bangor). We’ve been marketing, dining, off to Ellsworth tomorrow. The old group thins and rearranges itself, often drastically. Without Mary I might have pulled out altogether, but since she is here the others are sufficient. Tommy had a back operation and so has not been much in “operation.” The Booths are here and very agreeable they are.
Harriet came up for the 4th and perhaps will come up again in August. She’s in New York where she and Cathy are looking after their dogs and cats while the Grads are in Europe. Cathy has a job at a cake stand in Grand Central Station, Harriet “applied” to every hamburger and ice cream seller, but no luck. She doesn’t see England this summer. I think in August they will go biking somewhere here and then they must start at college about August 27th, with moving into their apartment a week before. Did I tell you that Mrs. Grad and I and the two girls have found a marvelously pretty, safe apartment for them. It belongs to a Dalton teacher who will be in England all year and it is quite beautiful, with plants, Mexican rugs, bright colors, books. What a joy and relief it was. My heart nearly stopped beating when we were looking around at the squalid, menacing things that turned up before.
I don’t have too much to say as I face this second page. Letters cannot be occasional or intermittent, can they? Somehow it is the long, wide gap between lives that makes letters impossible rather than necessary. I’m sure one writes his best letters to the ones just around the corner or just here yesterday. By that I mean I understand both the inertias about your own letter-writing you spoke of—it is physical and also formal. All of this even though I think of you often.
Much love,
Lizzie
315. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell63
[Castine, Maine]
August 7, 1975
Dearest Cal: Harriet spoke to me on the phone about having written you a letter, lost it, couldn’t find a stamp and so on. I would find when she returned from Europe all sorts of letters home stuffed in her knapsack. Anyway, she wanted me to tell you that she has been working at the New York Review the last month—stuffing envelopes—and now for a few weeks she and Cathy will go camping on Martha’s Vineyard—and then we’ll all be back in New York by August 25th. So … How the time goes, racing or sometimes very slowly. I will be glad to get back to New York, even at the end of August, and yet it has been nice up here most of the time. But strangely altered, too. Somehow the tennis hasn’t been going this summer with our group and the social life is more waiting to be asked to dinner or having to dinner. I have found it quite lonely a good deal of the time and that is something to think about, but I don’t quite cherish it although one does fall into the rhythm of whatever the gods lay down on us. I’m afraid the evening schnapps are the most gratefully awaited visitor of the day. At least I have read hugely, rather as I used to do when I was young and lying about in Lexington. This afternoon the great blessing of the Penguin prose translation of Heine.64 He grabs my heart.
Lots of little boats in the harbor. Clark Fitz-G. is marrying in a week or so65 and likewise Margot Booth66 and Mace Eaton was buried yesterday and Helen Austin is nearly blind and all67
316. Robert Lowell to Miss Elizabeth Hardwick
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
August 23, 1975
Dearest Lizzie:
Glad to have all the Castine news. Do you mean more than you say about Sally Austin? Somewhere, (Home and Garden?) I saw a house like yours, only with no windows on one side and three floors on another. Harriet’s working at the Review sounds like the inevitable footsteps of fate. I hope she’ll meet people there, if any are young enough.
I’ve really done nothing but work, even more than usual, though only a moderate amount done. Isn’t it said that if you let a bar tender drink all he wants, or a child eat a box of fudge a day—he’ll tire. I never do. Tomorrow I am going to an Irish poetry festival partly run by Seamus Heaney.68 A week and then back. Just because one loves writing doesn’t mean one likes what goes with it. Had a sour letter from Jim Powers returning to Minn. because Irish schools are too hard for his daughters—also for economy, and Irish culture isn’t worth the cost. Nothing breaks his irony and makes it seem a complaint.
It is hard writing to you so far away. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone you know except Stanley at another festival. He is so much healthier than anyone, in touch with a thousand poets and publications, reforming our garden, playing tennis—it’s hard to believe he was Auden’s age. I too miss tennis. I can find no one good enough to play, who plays badly enough for me. Maybe Harriet could learn. I had a huge selected Heine, it must be still around. He is one of the greatest and funniest writers in his prose. I read Flannery’s first novel.69 The saint and grotesque don’t jell quite well as I remembered at Yaddo. Still very much better than Updike’s Of the Farm,70 reams of fine conventional writing strung around one wonderful Frostlike old woman. Now I’m reading Vanity Fair71 and the Trial,72 BBC television parts of War and Peace.73 Prose is so entertaining after poetry, and so easy to read—simple language, plots[,] a style simple enough to draw you on for hundreds of pages. I think poetry is a sort of still-life meant not to run on with, but to gaze at. Hope your September in New York isn’t murderously hot. We are thinking of living there—after two years of Brookline! All my love and to letterless Harriet
All my Love,
Cal
317. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
September 1, 1975
Dearest Cal: To write the date, September 1, brings back all the memories of school, fall, new shoes. I welcome it as I did years ago. Lovely, lovely to be back in New York as I have been for a week, but bright days and cool nights, a few marvelous movies, restaurants with every ill-bred course the price of a diamond. Now at the end of the week I am off to Smith, not entirely wishing to go and yet not miserable at the thought. I am only required to be there the first three days of the week and I will come back a lot. Actually I hope to return the first week, on September 11, for Gillian Walker’s wedding to Al Maysles. Do you remember the film he did on you in Castine, with the bulldog direction of the English girl?74 They, Gillian and “Alfie” as he is called, have been together for about five years. She is absolutely lovely, wonderful in a new way, a little fatter, messier, and astonishingly brilliant to talk to about her work, “family therapy.” There are a lot of new ideas in this, striking new phrases for old afflictions. “Every report is a command.” Beyond that Gillian herself is greatly gifted in this kind of speculation and sympathy and just to talk to her in an intellectual way about it all is most exciting. Bobby and Arthur75 are doing the wedding out on Lo
ng Island and we can expect a kingly buffet since they have been doing recipes for the last year or so for Vogue. I hope to see Bill Alfred, the nicest anticipation always.
I am planning to “study” the collected Wallace Stevens because I don’t really know his work well and all through the summer whenever anyone who can read poetry turned up in Castine the vehement insistence that he was better than Eliot or Yeats or almost anyone anywhere ever came into the conversation. Strange how the patterns go isn’t it?
I did very little work in the summer; a lot of housekeeping and sunning instead. I didn’t particularly enjoy Maine this year, but like Smith I did not “hate” it and my house is so beautiful and consoling, with its tides at the window, the moon on the bedspread. The thing is one changes in the most drastic way, as I realized. In order [to] take in the changes that come from the outside everything within the soul turns, steps aside, tilts now to the left, now to the right. Couples in their houses, with their gardens, their herbs and vegetables, their perfect cooking, their dinners for eight (that is four couples). The anarchic life of the city, the social breakdown of small town standards finally, may not be good in itself but when one is used to it the other is hard to shift back to. I haven’t at all expressed what I mean because I love houses and dinners, but I had to break so many spells. Mary was beautiful and kind and interesting and I love her more and more and Jim is really a nice man, fun to be with, pleased with at least the Maine part of his life.
You see my Smith address enclosed but more importantly, Harriet’s telephone number. She is fine, as dear as ever, and yet changed, grown up. They are set up in their apartment, classes are ready to begin. I know she adores being on her own and I hope she will like college. Her work is interesting with two of the best Columbia/ history courses (France since 1848, Modern Ideologies) a philosophy course by the best woman at Barnard (Concepts of Death)76 and a Spanish course. The titles of these courses are rather stylish, but the reading is classic and hard. The girls do a lot of partying, as they call it, and one doesn’t inquire into the meaning. The vibrations of their liberation are overwhelming and I think even the shy, repressed Melissa was “liberated” in Paris this summer to the relief of everyone. I hope all is well with you. It will be wonderful to see you again after the New Year and Harriet told me to tell you how much she misses you and looks forward to your return.
Love always
Lizzie
318. Robert Lowell to Miss Elizabeth Hardwick
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
September 11, [1975]
Dearest Lizzie:
What lovely reverie and remembering letters from you! So much I can partly remember and imperfectly conjecture: Fitz-Gerald’s marriage (we found him heavy, but surely fate stepped too heavily on him)[,] Gillian, lovely and right, but I think back with a September sadness on poor Bill,77 though I’m sure this marriage will make him happy. He looks mostly like an old man now, slightly humped and bald-grizzled. His adoption of Don is an underworld task, like drawing water eternally in a sieve.
I wonder if you have my marked copy of the Collected Stevens—my selections built on Randall’s. There are too many I like: much of Harmonium, Sailing after lunch, Aesthetique du Mal, half the Rock (his own elegies and the most felt of his poems).78 He endlessly speculated on whether the actual or the imagined was the real thing—at his dying this question was more poignant. I can see how much you enjoy returning to New York; especially with that second Castine, the pastoral Smith, looming on you.
I am about to phone Harriet, and can hardly think she could be at the end of that new address and number. I envy her her classes—I could learn so much I think, as if I’d never been to college. You speak of changes, and I think you mean changing from one place to another—but another is reaching the age when the whiplash of college is no longer held over you … and you descend to revising your own writing, and learning history from short book reviews. I gather from your use of the term “partying” you at least know what it means. But what can one do, children are so soon on their own as we are—independent in all ways except financially. I think one should worry over dangers, not morals, but what can one do?
I feel the worst of old maids ending on that last phrase—so far from Wallace Stevens … or just from his poems.
Love,79
319. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
September 19, 1975
Dearest Cal:
I see you are now addressing me as Elizabeth Hardwick. I go back and forth 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.
About change I didn’t mean change of place, but all change. I am struck by the drastic alterations that are possible, maybe inevitable; and by the ghastly discovery that alas one is never too old to change. I don’t have anything quite definite in mind, and of courses the vices hold on like freckles. I was a little low this summer and now I am again feeling insanely cheerful. I adore going up to Smith—2 days only—/, but I am not set up for my own work there and so I merely teach and read and see people. But, ah, the library and coming home through the tallest most comforting trees at midnight. Like you I am only reading every “journal” in the world, all the late issues. I am sure it is a waste, but what an easy delight for the tired mind. And for all my adoration I go on Monday and return on Wednesday.
Harriet is very well … Aren’t morals and dangers connected, or at least habits and dangers? But she seems very grown up and the gods are caring for her. I assume that because of her sweetness in spite of her souring descent from Zeus and Hera.
Bill did not go to Gillian’s wedding. He felt it, I am sure.
I like Pasternak’s short biography Safe Conduct, which I am teaching. It has a moving nostalgic tone, with the old names—Professor Cohen of Marburg80 … and of course the account of Mayakovsky’s death is lovely and right.81
Farewell for another letter. I’d write more but nothing churns up. It will be nice to see you again and be ever in good health and bright of soul.
Love, as ever
Lizzie
320. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Elizabeth Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
October 1, 1975
Dearest Lizzie:
A few days ago we went to a party at Gaia’s where just about everyone like you/ had been through a summer depression. Gaia had reason because her son had had some dreadful crumbling disease of the knee in July. Now better. But even the indestructible John Gross, at work every morning at 7 for the TLS, had been depressed. I think I’ve been depressed, but confused with steady beaverlike revision and writing.
Change? But I don’t think I change. I age. Last week my oldest82 step-daughter, Ivana[,] the one who was burned[,] went off to boarding school. Sad and thrilling. It brought back my second form at St. Mark’s. All those trees and old boys, old girls!
I keep trying to phone Harriet. She’ll be a new version of herself by the end of the college year won’t she? Just from Columbia, even without her brainy courses.
Things I suppose are waking up. This week Mary and Yevtushenko are arriving in London. I’m back to having a weekly lunch with Sidney. He tells me he’s had a desperate year of heavy drinking and despondency. All over now, we think; but he does look thin and haggard and somehow different.
Thanks for the reverie of your wonderful letters.
Love,
Cal
* * *
PS. I give you back the name Lowell. I thought you might take umbrage.
321. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
Sunday November 16, 1975
Dearest
Cal: I am here at my typewriter writing letters when I should be merely writing. How happy I will be when the Smith session is over a few weeks from now. The dear old trees of Western Mass. will be heavy with snow then and all will be quiet and warm in the wooden mansions of Northampton, but I will be happy and warm in the rotten swarm of New York. It is the touring back and forth that I mind. The work, the people, the library—all are sweet. But then to go back to my apartment without a picture, an ornament, nothing but the faithful phone to break the sense of loneliness. It is ridiculous to speak of loneliness when I am only there one night a week, often. Still it has been very hard to get anything done of a slow and thoughtful nature.
I had a cocktail party for 45 people in honor of Stephen Spender and the visit to New York of Matthew and Maro Spender. It was the most unrewarding expenditure and meant to indemnify some of the many hosts and hostesses I am in arrears to. (Is that English?) Of course I have never been “entertained” and never will be by most of the guests, especially the most interesting ones. But it was Massachusetts that gave me that losing out feeling, the idea of being forgotten by dinner parties one doesn’t want to go to. Otherwise all is the same, ever and ever. Harriet was here for the party and was very well in every way. She speaks perhaps of going to England for a week or so after Christmas. I don’t think her mind is very fixed about it. It would be nice, rather like the cocktail party as an expense however. And nothing like in any other way. Of course you’ll be en route in late January, but still and still visiting you on your home turf might be more of a connecting thread across the widening gap of experience and life. I am happy for you about your new poems. What a courageous dedication yours is. Wasn’t the Nobel Prize to Montale nice and just?83 I read over some of your translations along with the Italian. Why did you use “diffident” for “indifferente” in Dora Markus?84 Otherwise they (your Montale) brought the drifting beauty of the works alive. Do you remember M. going up the Arno singing “In Questa Tomba Oscura” and along side, the “mosca?”85 I remember all. Much love, dear old one.
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 Page 41
