The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  [Telegram]

  [London]

  [n.d. October 1976]154

  HARRIET LOWELL C/O E LOWELL 15 WEST67ST NEWYORKCITYUNITEDSTATES

  I ALWAYS LOVE YOU WILL BE OUT THIS WEEKEND

  DAD

  340. Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell

  [Cambridge, Mass.]155

  [December 13, 1976]

  Darling Harriet:

  I can’t claim that infinite thought went into choosing this present for you, but it offers you almost infinite choices. All love to you and David for the oncoming year.

  My love,

  Daddy

  341. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Elizabeth Lowell

  Milgate Park, Maidstone, Kent, England

  January 11, 1977

  Dear Lizzie:

  To thankyou for so much kindness during my time in America—everything has been much quieter here. The great headache is how and where to move from England before the new tax laws which cut unearned incomes to nothing, or so it seems. A rather undemocratic necessity. I wonder if we haven’t all been unconscious secret capitalists for years. The real trouble of course is where to take or put the children. Nothing can be done until it is.

  We spend our time writing. I am more than half way through the Eumenides working from translations. Terrible the Aeschylean translator’s hackneyed grand rhetoric—it keeps smearing to my version. With luck I’ll have the whole Oresteia ready to be acted late spring in New York.156 The best translations I’ve see[n] are Yeats’ Oedipus and Pound’s Sophocles, an odd mixture of early Pound and Browning.157 Most [of] the important poetry of the world, plays in particular, has never been done into English and perhaps never will now.

  I must tell you later about our Christmas with the Mostyn-Owens—the Wests, seven children, seven hour train trips and seven hour dinners.

  My socialist-anarchist earned income half-person will be at Harvard by the first of February with a room or rooms in Dunster House.

  Aunt Sarah has told Jackie158 she wants to see me, and I realize how much I’ve wanted this too. Jackie says she is so absent-minded she may forget.

  How is Harriet’s job-hunting? Natalya is doing more or less the same, but is now seriously trying to get into college and pass O-levels.159 Genia lives in a world of rapidly changing holiday romance. Ivana is still a little girl doing charades, collecting dolls and wanting to become a professional actress. Sheridan is force embodied in person.

  See you soon,

  love,

  Cal

  * * *

  PS. Tell Bob that reviewing Elizabeth is too much for many reasons160—and on top rushing Aeschylus to a deadline in March.

  [Lowell flew to Boston on January 17, 1977. On February 1, he was admitted to Phillips House at Massachusetts General Hospital for cardiac failure. He was released on February 9.]

  342. Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell

  [Cambridge, Massachusetts]

  March 18, 1977

  Dearest Harriet:

  Here’s an Easter present to save or spend on some bright wearable thing, perhaps a mark-down from your boutique. I had hoped to see you in New York soon, but will be with Caroline in Ireland during my vacation, March 30–April 10. Ireland? Caroline has found us two flats in a building on the outskirts of Dublin, looking like and almost as big as the Louvre—one for the teenagers and one for us.161 She always says and writes that one of its advantages is you will come and visit. The other advantage is much lower taxes.

  I am teaching Whitman. One of the critics’ insoluble problems is whether he was a socialist … and believed in taxes. I think so often of you with happiness … your gentle (dazzling) beauty. Be seeing you early in May when I expect to spend a week in New York.

  all my love,

  Dad

  343. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy

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

  June 15, 1977

  Dearest Mary: I have missed being in touch with you more than I can say. It has been for the last year or more so hard to find the time for anything like a real letter with so many non-real letters to be written. But I am setting forth on this before I take off for Berkeley, come back after being on the plane all night without sleep and take off for Russia the next day. I’m sorry you aren’t going, but I will see you/ in Maine sometime in mid-July. Then I’ll have to come back before Labor Day because I will teach at Barnard on Monday and track up to the University of Connecticut on Tuesday at dawn to return at Thursday at midnight. And so even that, a few months away, haunts me.

  I want to give you some idea of what has been happening here, give it as clearly as I can. Cal came to Cambridge in November, having been in the hospital and for some reason Caroline had fled to Cambridge in October. He was very well I heard and felt on the phone, very low and troubled, but things did not go well and he went to live across town with his friend,162 but seeing C. all the time. Then she went back to England and he stayed on, waiting for the spring term and because she did not want him to come back with her. Soon after I had to be in Boston and spent three or four hours with him, where he was weeping and saying he would do anything he could to make the marriage work, and speaking of his deep love for Caroline. She did not give him the right to come for Christmas until a few days before and I had said he could come here and stay in the studio and have Christmas with us. But he was allowed to go to England, as you know./

  He returned from England, very sad and troubled. Had congestive heart failure and was in the hospital for ten day[s]. I went up to see him, and talked to the doctors, but the water was finally drained from his lungs so that he could breathe and he took up his teaching for the second term, living very quietly in Dunster House. Caroline suddenly moved to Ireland, after the plan had been that they would move here, where he could teach, and since some move had to be made for her taxes. But he was still troubled and grieving and said he hoped she would consent to have him come for the Easter break. He was as “well” as Cal can be, most pleasing in being close to his feelings, serious about someone else, grieving for love (Caroline). At the last minute she said he could come to Ireland and I thought everything would work all right because he was very well, very sad over the long separation. He returned saying that she had said the marriage was over and he supposed it was for the best. Again, very grieved, quiet, troubled. Three weeks passed and he did not hear from her, although he wrote.

  At this time, I said if you don’t have any place to go you can come here. The term was almost ended and he only had to return once more for the papers, grades and so on. By the time he arrived here, Caroline had changed her mind and said she wanted him to return, that it could be mended. He said he didn’t think it could. She insisted on coming to New York which she did. All this time, with Caroline and for the last few years—corroborated by people in England and in Boston during her stays—there had been drinking, depression, suicide attempts. Cal got a doctor for Caroline when he knew she was coming to New York, a doctor who had given a friend a treatment, lasting a few weeks, of pills that gradually help to lift depression, Caroline’s life-long agony. They went to do the doctor, but before that, the night of her arrival, Cal called me from Lenox Hill Hospital where Caroline had been taken on a stretcher, having passed out in the hotel lobby. But she came to, and ran out of the hospital, and they went back to the hotel. (The passing out does not seem clear to me—maybe pills and alcohol, maybe suicide attempt, I don’t know.) She went back to the doctor and Cal was told that she couldn’t be left alone and he did not leave her alone, but she wouldn’t take the pills, would drink and at/ night, as she wasn’t supposed to. He was terrified and would come back to the studio, which was really Blair Clark’s because he had rented it [from] me—come back for an hour and rush back to see Caroline, out of fear and worry. I have never known him to take such care—it may not be much, knowing how careless he can be, but it was complete. She wanted him to come back to Ireland but he said he didn’t think it would work and that he would come in
September, before Harvard, as he plans to do. Cal was in tears, trembling, calling the doctor the doctor four or five times a day. He insisted that a doctor be found in Dublin and with great effort he and the doctor did that. The weeks went on and she stayed here in New York and finally Cal had to return to Boston for a final week. He was with Caroline the whole time and when he finally went to Boston she left for Ireland. Since then he has called, had his friends call, talks and thinks of nothing else, worries terribly. But she seems at least to be alive and not speaking of suicide at the moment, although he fears she can do it and it has been a horrible fear for several years.

  I haven’t been a part of this at all and Caroline has never mentioned my name to Cal. The fact is that I am not a part of it, there is no great renewed romance, but a kind of friendship, and listening to his grief. His intention is to stay here with me, staying mostly in the studio, but sharing the life here, the books, the records, his family setting (Boston), which is pretty much as he left it. He went up to Maine with me for part of the week I spent there opening up. It could be said we “are back together,” but the phrase is not really meaningful—at least in the way it is commonly used. There is no thought of his getting a divorce, but there is a general peacefulness (except when there isn’t) and a great preoccupation with Caroline, her future, the children.

  For my own part, I was alone, not at all happy, but often having quite a good time, and adjusted to what pleasures I had, but quite lonely much of the time and worried about the future.163 I am not at all as vulnerable to Cal as I used to be, but I care for him. He has learned something from love and from being as he said when he came back from England the last time, “unwanted.”164 The passion and the grief he knew from Caroline and from his feeling for her have made him more like the rest of us. We are trying to work out a sort of survival for both of us, and both are sixty. He does not feel he is good for Caroline and that her thinking so right now is less real than her not thinking so most of the time in the last years. I think he would return immediately if he thought she could want it for more than a week.

  We, together, are having a perfectly nice time, both quite independent and yet I guess dependent. I know that Cal can get sick again and will talk to the McLean doctor on the way up to Maine. Cal has been very much in touch with him, working out what could be most sensibly done if he becomes/ “keyed up.” I realize that is scarcely the way it happens. But that and our attempt to manage the heart problem—no salt, etc.—is about the case.

  I put all of this down, leaving out much, hardly able to give the slightest picture of anything as I understand it. About Caroline—Cal thinks she’s the greatest living writer—I do feel she has the greatest possibilities in Ireland and I hope so. I very much admire a new book—Greatgranny Webster, it is called—that is coming out.165 I liked Stepdaughter too[.]166

  I hear what a hard and busy time you have had working, but also hear that both of you are well. I look forward to seeing you on Main Street very much. Forgive this letter and do not think it strange. I just felt a need to give the “narration.” You don’t need to answer because I will scarcely be in the house before Maine.

  Dearest love always,

  Lizzie

  344. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Craft

  [Castine, Maine]

  August 4, 1977

  Dearest Robert: So the shifts, the caftans, the dressing gowns, the hair curlers cranked out of the driveway and are gone. I suppose these last items of severance are horrible for you, and indeed for Alfreda.167 If you wanted to give someone a blessing, I suppose you’d wish that in all their connections the moment of the end would come for both at the same time. But, of course, it can’t be; whoever utters the first goodbye is inevitably because of that “ahead.” And so anger, resentment, the whole thing. I wish you both well, as the saying goes, and that all the friends on both sides insisting that each is “better off” turn out to be near the truth.

  Catharine Huntington—I remember her face well from meetings here and there in Boston, although I cannot say that I know her or that she remembers me. Katherine Anne Porter’s piece on Sacco and Vanzetti in a recent Atlantic was good168—and again marvelous photographs of the “girls rioting” as Allen Tate used to say.

  Here. First of all my house is not as one-ly as I perhaps said. It is beautiful, I think, the old large barn as the main room and then a two-story wing was added. There are actually three bedrooms and two baths. It is just that there was no place for two to work. I work in the guest room and push things away when a guest comes—so far, mercifully, only two nights planned for the whole summer. Cal got a little boathouse on the beach, a sort of adorable shack, about three houses away and that is the only thing we needed in so far as housing for work is concerned. And some solitude during the day for both of us. I am working every day and have done a chapter, starting with fear to read it over just after this letter and make improvements that gleam out like flares, the need for the gleams I mean. But the summer has been very, very nice. A few drinks in the evening, dinner, music—and here one tends to get up soon after seven.

  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 don’t like being up in Maine alone for long periods and it has been marvelous to have Cal here. In New York everything is different; I am happy there in my old ways and if they return that is all right. 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. I cannot say that such a record would have been a certain glory. So, don’t worry, darling. It is not all up to him.

  Mary McCarthy is here in her splendid mansion and that is a great pleasure. She is slim, looks very beautiful and is at every moment interesting—a triumph.

  Storrs—the winterreise169 falls down on my head like ice when I think of it. I get ideas about flying back and forth, renting a car at the airport each time—and think I remember that would cost two hundred per week. But it will all work out, the few months will pass and my course won’t be good. I’ll try to slide by the grease of personality.170

  Am reading Eugene O in the odd Nabokov translation and dreaming of our night in the opera.171 Will talk to you soon. I hope to see you in New York soon after Labor Day, on the weekends when I am there. Adored your letter, your card—all.

  Dearest love,

  Elizabeth

  Inscription on front endpaper of Day by Day: “For Lizzie,|who snatched me out of|chaos,|with all my love|in Castine Aug. 1977|Cal”172

  [Associated Press, September 12, 1977, AM cycle. New York: Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Robert Lowell, 60, died here Monday of a heart attack while on a taxi ride from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan, said his former wife, Elizabeth Hardwick.

  Miss Hardwick said Lowell’s death was discovered by the taxi driver.

  “He had been in Ireland for a week to see his son and was coming home from Dublin,” Miss Hardwick said. “The driver said he got in the cab at the airport and died on the way, I suppose.”

  “The elevator man called me and I went down and we went to the hospital and they said he was dead. I think it was from a heart attack,” she said. “The driver at first thought he was asleep. I guess he died sometime between when he got in the taxi and the time he got here.”

  Miss Hardwick, who was divorced from Lowell in 1973, said the poet was to spend a few days in N
ew York before leaving for Massachusetts, where he was to teach at Harvard University this year.

  The Boston-born Lowell received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1947 and also had been awarded the poetry prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guinness Poetry Award and the National Book Award.

  Before winning the Pulitzer and Academy prizes Lowell had published “Land of Unlikeness” in 1944 and “Lord Weary’s Castle” in 1946.

  The son of Robert Traill Spence Lowell and the former Charlotte Winslow, Lowell grew up in Boston and attended Harvard University from 1935 to 1937. He was graduated summa cum laude from Kenyon College in 1940.

  After graduation he served briefly as an editorial assistant with Sheed and Ward here. During World War II he was a conscientious objector.

  In 1947 and 1948, he served as a consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress, and during the same period he had a Guggenheim fellowship.

  His other works included “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” published in 1951; “Life Studies,” which won the National Book Award in 1959; “Phaedra”; “Imitations,” which won the 1962 Bollingen translation prize; “For the Union Dead,” 1964; “The Old Glory,” 1965; “Near the Ocean,” 1967; “Notebook of a Year,” 1969, and “History,” “For Lizzie and Harriet” and “The Dolphin,” all published in 1973.

  Lowell’s first marriage to Jean Stafford in 1940 ended in divorce eight years later and in 1949 he married Miss Hardwick, by whom he had a daughter, Harriet Winslow Lowell.

  At the time of his death, Lowell was married to Caroline Blackwood, who lives in Ireland. He had a son by Miss Blackwood.]173

  345. Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy

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

  October 2, 1977