Harriet is well, has finished the year except for one Incomplete—a strange and popular burden the present day student takes on and as a consequence is years later writing papers in courses long since forgotten. Our girl doesn’t come home very much but we speak on the telephone almost every day.
I hope you are feeling well and happy. Stephen Spender has just left and I bring him up since he seemed amazingly cheerful, no doubt due to the effervescence of some new “love” and his own tireless, ageless belief in this lucky charm. He is quite adorable I think. I told him I had received MacShane’s Raymond Chandler109 and looked up Spender, Stephen and Spender, Natasha in the index. “What did you think”—“Well, too many trips.”—“That’s just the trouble. Natasha loves to go abroad.”
Goodbye, dearest one, and be in good health. No, no answer required. This is just an “on-going” record from the States.
Lizzie
333. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Elizabeth Hardwick Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent, Eng.
June 8, 1976
Dearest Lizzie:
I remember Ivor110 once startling me by saying he sometimes didn’t know whether he existed. That was in my Life Studies day, and I couldn’t believe it. Now your nice letters bringing me back Maine almost from the blue … assure me I do exist.
Caroline has been ailing for almost three months, not back this time, but some obscure stomach trouble, difficulty in swallowing, difficulty in keeping food down. As hospitals and tests approached and receded, first London, then Zurich, she rapidly got better—is almost well now but not quite.
Elizabeth Bishop is about to visit here for two days—an informal visit, but not one to take lightly. The dog must be sent away because of her asthma but will that be enough? Half our chairs are tainted with dog hairs. Then so many things she can criticize, the disheveled garden, the carefree garden man, our care of Sheridan. Should he be sent away too? So many things down to my not writing meter, making errors in description. Of course no one is more wonderful, but so fussy and hazardous now. Her set subject in person and letters is scolding with affectionate fury over Frank Bidart (whom she half-depends on) a safe thing though grating.
Next week I am to hear sections of my Phèdre set by Benjamin Britten.111 Do you remember our dinner with him and Pairs (?)112 ages ago when I mortally wounded Bob Giroux by ordering another bottle of his expensive wine? The meeting otherwise went cordially, but I never heard again from Britten. This winter I learned he had had a very severe and incapacitating heart attack and had just now finished Phèdre (only her tirades)[,]113 his first work since partial recovery.114
My students go in heavily for incompletes, it’s the catch to assigning papers instead of exams. So Harriet is in vogue. We hope she’ll come here, if New York gets too hot. Don’t envy you City College in July. I suppose you feel awfully looked-at yet limited in motion at Castine. It all—the landscape—came back to me with Phil Booth’s poems115—meditations like photos, but solidly something.
Look forward to August 21 and your London arrival.116 You’ll mail me your address. Our country number, if you will call, is 0622-38028 Maidstone. Why amn’t I asked to the Penn Club? Dues? Tact? The Democratic Convention sounds like the heat of New York doubled. Won’t you see it on television, as I did Chicago?117
Love,
Cal
334. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[15 West 67th Street, New York, N.Y.]
June 20, 1976
Dearest Cal:
Quivering summer nights here in New York. And can you believe I am still going to things. Ballet with bewitching defected Russians;118 Threepenny Opera, a perfect little work of art.119 I can hear Philip Rahv’s unbelieving hiss: “culture monger!” But why monger for the excited audience?
In two months I will be in London. Will let you know where I’m to be and will call you to arrange a meeting before I step into the iron claws of the “agenda.” I am only doing this for the ride, as we say here.
I am inspired by Pasternak’s Safe Conduct and read it over and over again. For instance: “The beginning of April surprised Moscow in the white stupor of returning winter. On the seventh it began to thaw for the second time, and on the fourteenth when Mayakovsky shot himself, not everyone had yet become accustomed to the novelty of spring.” “The seventh” is magically concrete and the whole passage uses nature in the most wonderfully dramatic way.120
Your Selected arrived and I read it over with a pounding of feelings of all sorts.121 How unnerving it is to read work written by those close to us; the thickness of one’s acquaintance with the brute stuff of the lives there on the page makes this kind of reading not like reading at all. It weaves in and out of the years, wrenching often, brilliant and glittering in the seeing and remembering. Sometimes the images are like knives, slicing through the block of experience. Of course I mind the lines seeming to have issued from me: especially the strange and utterly puzzling idea of Harriet being good and normal because of her good and normal parents.122
Ah, well, I noted that you attended the proper Abbey mummifying of Henry James.123 I went to Colorado to speak this spring and grabbed a volume of the short novels and read right through: Washington Square, Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers, The Pupil.124 To do that suddenly after a few years was a true literary experience—a sort of new, unexpected joyful exhilaration. The mystery of it, the mystery of him. Going back over some of your work had the same effect upon me of a trembling newness there to be taken in by the reader.
Saturday afternoon it is here and people streaming into Central Park. A steel band (Trinidad) playing in the street, the garbage truck grinding away. Dearest love and all of the joys of the season.
Lizzie
335. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Hardwick
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent, Eng.
July 2, 1976
Dearest Lizzie:
You caught our James appearance. We went with Rolando,125 who was disappointed that no one at all except literary people went—so different from the crowds of senators and members of parliament to receive [the] gold replica of the Magna Carta, also at Westminster, which we also went to. We seem to be on their list, this morning an invitation came to hear the ambassadoress126 speak in the 900 year old Cathedral close, accompanied by soldiers and officials in dramatic many colored costumes—an advertisement for the disembarking tourist?
Just heard Stephen and Isherwood in a public conversation on the poets of the Thirties.127 Stephen giggling, “Unfortunately, it seems that poets do have to be educated[”] (on the limitations of their group not being proletarian). Isherwood matter of fact, no cant, his only cause homosexuality[,] this too his motive for going to Berlin.128 Auden dominated the whole thing, the only name the audience could ask questions about—Poor Day Lewis, his wife,129 there, only cited as a plagiarist. Others have distinction, but only Auden has a brilliant changing intellectual outline—even his oddities: “Frogs won’t do … Why go to plays, it’s so unEnglish.”
Thanks for Percival Lowell.130 I hadn’t realized his errors were so fruitful, I suppose that’s the rule in science. In the family, we always doubted his Mars, but swore by the accuracy and orthodoxy of his Pluto … once to have been called Percival.131
I regret the Letters in Dolphin. The only way to make a narrative was to leave a few. I hesitated to send you a copy of the Selected Poems, but Giroux acted on his own, which was right because the bulk of them were written under your eyes. I’m glad some of it stood up for you. I read all in one day, trying to proofread—so much I hadn’t taken in for ages—one doesn’t really attending absorb what one is reading at readings. Autobiography predominates, almost forty years of it. And now more journey of the soul in my new book. I feel I, or someone, wrote everything beforehand. If I had read it at twenty would I have been surprised, would I have dared go on?
For a month, I think, the heatwave has been here, like an American city, like inland America—to the En
glish the melting of the icecap.
Love, Cal
* * *
P.S. Greatly looking forward to your August.
336. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell132
Castine, [Maine]
July 5, 1976
Dearest Cal: I am sitting on the deck outside, typing. The bi-centennial birthday (celebration for us, as they kept saying) has passed on. The “great ships” were extraordinarily beautiful and the fireworks all night from the Statue of Liberty were marvelous. I came up here but saw it all on TV. There is now a one hour non-stop jet to Bangor and so I have been week-ending like a stock broker. This afternoon, it is Monday, I go back to finish some work, then stay another week for the Democratic Convention and perhaps write about it if I can find any ideas.133 Your George 3rd134 was a lovely idea—perfectly inspired answer to the bicentennial laureate challenge. I enclose copy and also the clippings from Village Voice,135 all excited and interesting indeed. Philip Booth was down this morning for renewal of date memory about the Castine Years, all in preparation for a Salmagundi Lowell issue.136 Philip is well, but I wonder if he can do a portrait which I thought would be more valuable than the “encouragement to a young poet (“himself”)[”] theme.
Let’s see—I always have a thousand things to share with you, but how the letter writing energy seems to diminish with the years. I suppose that if I had a period in a pension I could wake up and rush to it, but it is hard to find the communicating tranquility in one’s own house with the chores standing there like hungry cats, waiting, calling out.
Harriet is studying typing, finishing term papers, swimming in the Columbia indoor pool and getting an apartment together on west 108th—apparently it is quite nice and even had a view from which the ships great and small, tall and short could be seen. She is thin, looks very nice and seems very happy. I hope I can entice her or impound her for a weekend at least here where she was as a baby and where she trod without I think it ever really gripping her soul somehow. She knows only the profound memories of New York, a New York girlhood. I am having I suppose a New York old age. I read in the paper that our city is now full of all the chic people from London, Paris and Rome. And to think one is already there himself. Columbus Avenue has become very interesting, a bit like old Third Avenue with shops and restaurants; and the Cafe des Artistes has been cleaned up and is such a success one must reserve days in advance. There is the 67th Street news … I am here sunning and typing before going off to Bangor and the Halls, David and Berenice, have just gone by, beachcombing for Americana and as heavily sentimental as ever. I was saying that I loved going and coming as if it were Long Island because I don’t want to be here steadily any more … too lonely. She said, but don’t you think it is just good for you to be here. I said, not particularly and they went off chagrined. I do love my house with a greedy intensity and the sea, the air, the people—thinning out somehow—are all dear to me, but still there is sometimes a sadness too.
I am sending off this letter to accompany things about you—all of them arriving on top of a like/ packet sent by Bob Giroux probably. Anyway, I will be back in touch and you needn’t write. I would like to see the Nolans when I come in August if they are friendly with me after I said no to the festschrift.
Much love
Lizzie
337 . Robert Lowell to Mrs. Elizabeth Hardwick Lowell
Milgate Park, Maidstone, Kent, Eng.
July 12, 1976
Dearest Lizzie:
Stephen called up to attach me to the Penn club meeting,137 to put me on the same panel with you and Susan, I think. Was this your suggestion? It will be a delight and honor. Our first official appearance on the same platform since Greensboro before Randall’s death, and even then we were two separate days.138
Glad to get the review and poem. Reviews seem to be running better than my last books—the heavy joshing daily critic—having written History, I am now almost treated as if I already belonged to it, to its shadowy posthumous shadow-life. Is that what the pagan’s world of shades meant? I did get the bicentennial poem to order wanting to get outside myself, as one might with translations. I got it done one drawn-out week-end. But I thought it never could be worked, first too short, then sprawling to two pages—portentously solemn with General Stark139 contrast with my Tory Boston Winslows. I was glad to [be] lost in Newsweek’s bad prose instead of dim verse. Did you read Mrs. Carter, unable to like people? Weren’t they awful in general?140
Man is never happy. I have been chronically complaining about overconcentration on work, both because of what it does to one, how it distracts, and because I feel afraid of a certain stylistic callousness, plough-pushing if there’s such archaic idiom. Now on the verge of mailing off my new book, 70 pages, longish typed ones, I feel in this ebb of the European heatwave, as if all the grass has been burned off the view. Pause and be wise;141 but the machine goes on clanking in the head.142
I can see how Castine must be lonely for you, and exposed, perhaps, when you want to be invisible. In New York, you are seen when you intend to be, though screened from nature. The one hour Bangor jet is an unexpected miracle of progress—I remember the last passenger train to Bangor. If the clock can’t be put back, it can be put ahead.
I seem to be gassing to no purpose. What is exciting is your coming visit. I would be embarrassed to confess how much I count on it.
We have just gotten a house in Cambridge for fall term, the best we’ve ever had apparently, large enough for Harriet and Cathy. So glad to hear she is happy. First year college is a tricky time, so full of new chances, new duties and fears. I wrote a little while ago, but expect no answer, and trust we are together without exchange.
Have you read the mugging instructions issued to the Democratic delegates? Be careful you are not mistaken for one.
All my love,
Cal
338. Robert Lowell to Miss Elizabeth Hardwick Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent, Eng.
September 4, 1976
Dearest Lizzie:
I can’t find the words or maybe the style to say how comforting and enjoyable your visit was. It was so strange seeing you and Caroline easily (?) together, that I almost feel I shouldn’t refer to it. People with us seemed to take it as naturally as we did, one wondered if they were making an effort. I want to thank you for the strain you may have felt, but never revealed. I can never have too many compliments from you, and loved your liking what I said.
Also Susan. In my thickness, I think I wouldn’t have known how sick she had been or have had doubts about her future wellbeing. She has always been a warm polite person to me and I felt she went further than that in London. (Sometimes I think I am the enemy of womankind, and sometimes coming in from the country, I feel I can’t keep up a conversation, even with old friends like the Spenders. Two nights before our Murdoch-Spender dinner,143 I ate alone with them. For half an hour I prayed that I wouldn’t have to go. When I went, at first I couldn’t talk, and never to Natasha, then it loosened, so much so Natasha suggested we go on shop-talking and she’d go home.) End of long parenthesis. You must have felt lonely arriving in a largely strange city, stuck in that Penta Hotel with such mobs of unknown, unmysterious clubmates. And to get back to Susan, how nice to hear her say, as she has more or less said in print that you are the best prose-writer in America,144 and isn’t it wonderful that she is someone younger not Mary’s nannying age. Lord. Lord, I have been writing to Allen Tate and Jean Stafford (very sick) and wondering if I wasn’t writing last letters.
I can’t contain this paragraph. It fascinated me that your Billie Holiday was written as part of your novel.145 I wouldn’t have guessed, but now I think I see the cause of the more delicate, more poetic (?) prose. Don’t tell me anything, but let me surmise that you are writing something close to autobiography, closer than plot will usually allow, that the style and selections will be artfully angled and chosen, so that the form might seem startlingly experimental even. Don’t te
ll me either if, where and how I turn up. Shall I say you are welcome to anything about me in Smiling through you can use … even what you haven’t shown me. What a ludicrous offer (what you have already)146 [.] I do think you should use anything you can control. Caroline at this moment is piecing a bookreview of a leaking Irish house147 into a piece of childhood autobiographical fiction.148
We fly on the 15th, 46 Sacramento St. Cambridge. I can see how poor Randall a little before his death, wondered how he could talk throu[gh] a class—the great teacher. I don’t doubt now, though I am a very old number, replenished, I think in dour moments, by new reviews of old familiar books. How odd to talk about James’s American149 I last read first year Kenyon.
I think all the time about Harriet, with stiff, bearish affection. Could I meet David (?)150 sometime in your apartment—not to approve but to acquaint myself. This is a moment, I suppose, before another unforeseeable moment. In my darkness, I am reassured. (over)151
No more really. I can’t write these air-mail letters without running my last words into the fold.… I chose the sonnet you particularly detested because of the woodchuck lines at the bottom and didn’t notice, I guess, the top.152
Caroline sends her love. Let me phone soon after I arrive.
Love,
Cal
* * *
P.S. Will you ever see Sheridan? He came to breakfast helmeted in a huge pot, which has now burned the soup, so the whole long house asphyxiates. He’s at a movie about a car without a driver, a masterpiece like the red balloon.153
[On September 15, 1976, Lowell was hospitalized at Greenways Nursing Home in London, for mania.]
339. Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 Page 43
