The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  Dearest Mary: I feel as if I were a hundred years older than when I last talked to you here in my apartment, a day or two after great Cal died. We had the Boston funeral and the flowers from you and Jim were there in the beautiful church and lower Beacon Hill was on that morning just as it was around the time Cal was born. The family graveyard at Dunbarton lay under a mist of rain; great trees and a few autumn leaves on the ground and the old gravestones, beginning with General John Stark and ending with Dear Cal, since the place is small and belongs to the New Hampshire Historical Society, having been endowed by Cal’s grandfather. That was the end. But it was the beginning of a nightmare here for me. Caroline somehow moved in with me for 8 days and nights to prepare for the Memorial Service. I don’t think any single night I slept for more than two hours. Her poor drunken theatricality hour after hour, day after day, night after night was unrelieved torture for me and I am sure for herself much more. Somehow she has put herself beyond help and sadly for her all help begins at the same spot—to stop drinking, at least for today, tomorrow, for a week, an evening.

  Finally I had to go to work and when I went up to Storrs, Connecticut, to a lonely little furnished room I have there for my stay each week, only then could I burst into sobs and realize that Cal was truly gone forever. It is terrible. I remember that you said I was used to living alone and indeed that is true, but it has been much more painful than I thought it reasonable to show, much more lonely and sometimes frightening. Having the companionship of Cal this summer and some of the spring before was a wonderful break of lightness and brightness for me.

  I understand you are to be at the London Memorial. I am sure it will be graceful and moving and I am glad you are to be present.

  Dear Mary, I am still too tired to put much into this letter. But a lot I would like to talk to you about shouldn’t go in a letter in any case. I do hope to come to Paris, perhaps in January, and I would always hope you were coming here if that were something that would please you, which I doubt it would just now. For the moment I will just send dearest love to you both.

  Lizzie

  346. Elizabeth Hardwick to Elizabeth Bishop

  [Castine, Maine]

  August 16, 1978

  Dear Elizabeth:

  I am looking over the harbor imagining I see North Haven, but I probably don’t reach that far in the blessed little bit of fog today. I never imagined I’[d] be longing for a bit of rain—all night and sun in the morning will do—but as the man who keeps mowing my grassless, burnt-out lawn says, “I’m mowing out them fall dandelions the heat has brought on.”

  Frank read me your beautiful poem174 over the phone and I wept when I went to sit outside and think about it. Oh, the magical details of North Haven and the way you bring them with such naturalness and feeling into a human landscape, to Cal. Your art is always able to do that—and the genuineness, the lack of strain, the truth of things. This poem moves me unbearably. I’ve just heard it read once and Frank will send me a copy soon I hope.

  When Harriet came up with me [at] the end of May, Cal seemed to be about everywhere: his red shirt and socks were a painful discovery. The death is unacceptable and yet I know he has gone and it is very difficult to bring the two together ever.

  I’ve been here since the beginning of July. Strange, I never loved Maine more, the place itself, my house, and the changing islands which you describe with such perfection. I have to go back on Labor Day and wish it were otherwise.

  Much love to you,

  Elizabeth (H.)

  347. Mary McCarthy to Elizabeth Hardwick

  141 rue du Rennes, Paris 75006

  June 4, 1979

  Dearest Lizzie:

  You’ll have been puzzled—or hurt, or both—that I haven’t written sooner about your book.175 More than a month has gone by; I read it at once, of course, and ought to have sent a postcard immediately in the first freshet of my admiration. But a p.c. seemed too inexpressive for the occasion, and I had no time for a variety of reasons to write the letter that was in my mind. Well, on my return from the U.S., I had recklessly put an ad in the Figaro for a replacement for Maria; the result was 180 candidates presenting themselves by telephone. This halted all work on my page proofs,176 already overdue at Harcourt, and every other activity. I interviewed throughout five days—twenty-five or thirty women perched nervously on the sofa—and finally chose one. You’ll see her in Castine, a Spanish girl called Elvira, who is a mistress of the iron, if not much at the stove. After that, there were the proofs waiting and an acknowledgment page to do, and after that, a speech to write for the P.E.N. Club in London: I was an emergency substitute for Isaac Singer. Then the speech had to be delivered, and we went to London. On my return, there was fresh business for Harcourt to attend to and Elvira to break in. Carmen arrived, and I lent her Sleepless Nights, which she is very keen on, so much so that she was slow to return it. The weekend following the P.E.N. lecture I had to go to Los Angeles, where I procured another copy at the Beverly Hills Brentano’s; I spent two days at the booksellers’ convention, having a lunch given for me with reviewers and a reception at the downtown Hilton for 500 booksellers, followed by a dinner for HBJ personalities. Having left Paris on Sunday evening, I came back Wednesday evening in a dazed, virtually sleepless state with my memory almost blacked out and had to do the jacket copy for my book, which I’d been putting off owing to these other events. All that is now over, and it is a peaceful long weekend—Pentecost—and at last I can try to tell you what I think of Sleepless Nights.

  It’s a classic, Lizzie. That was my reaction when I closed it and it grows stronger. You’ve done it, created a nearly perfect thing—I don’t know why I say “nearly,” maybe because of three printer’s errors I marked. It’s a true work of art, very moving, painfully so in places—the “mound of men” at the end transfixed me like the swords of the Seven Sorrows177—and yet utterly composed, in both senses, not the hair of a syllable out of place. What seem to me peripheral, random, almost fugitive reminiscences are held together by a magic centripetal force—the force of suffering, I suppose, refined to purity and acting like a magnet to pull all the little iron filings into its field. I’m dumbstruck. It had to be short, of course; compactness belongs to its essence. And what courage it took to be true to it; I don’t mean the courage of autobiography—candor of revelation—but literary daring. You’ve made something new, unlike anything previous.

  One thought that came to me was that I wish Philip could have seen it. He used to say “Lizzie is so literary.” He meant it as half a compliment, in wonderment, shaking his head. You’ve proved him right, more than he knew; you’ve brought about a triumph of the “literary” over life’s materials. And you could only do that by being incurably “bookish.” You make my heavily plotted, semi-lifelike novel seem like a bone-crusher. And the faults I’ve occasionally found in your writing—of being pitched too high, too prone to dying falls of epigram—disappear here or turn into a virtue.

  I wonder what Cal would think. He’d be put out somewhat in his vanity to find himself figuring mainly as an absence and absence that the reader doesn’t miss. Even during the years when he was evidently on the scene, e.g. in Amsterdam. I like your idea of wondering whether you might not change his hair color to red178—very funny, and it demonstrates how little his thisness (haecceitas), rather than mere/ thatness, matters.179 When I read the first bits in the New York Review, I couldn’t see how you were going to cope with the huge fact of Cal; it didn’t occur to me that you could do it by simply leaving him out. That’s a brilliant technical stroke but proves to be much more than that: he becomes a sort of black hole in outer/ space, to be filled in ad lib, which is poetic justice: he’s condemned by the form to non-existence—you couldn’t do that in a conventional autobiography. In any case, he couldn’t patronize your book by appearing to be generous about it, though I suppose he might try.

  We’ll talk about it more this summer; Jim has marked his calendar: “June 14; Lizzie arri
ves in Castine.” He is enthusiastic about the book and is “selling” it by word of mouth. You’ve done wonders with Ida and with a wisp of Tommy Thomas that I think I recognize. But I can’t place Alex or Louisa,180 unless she owes something to Caroline and something to Natasha.181 It’s strange to read a book by someone one knows as well as we know each other and be puzzled by a few of the component parts. Even by internal evidence, it’s clear, of course, that some alchemy has taken place. Yet there will be readers who insist on seeing it as “straight” autobiography, and I can hear myself patiently separating truth from fiction for someone like Ellie.182 The fact that the effect, though subdued and controlled, is one of mounting pain, will worry some of your friends; it worried Carmen a little. To me, that is a melancholy/ truth, evidently, but one of many in your nature, as though a secret part spoke suddenly for the whole. To me, the point is the artistic victory, which can’t fail to exhilarate, i.e., to make one rejoice for you. Quite aside from the success the book is bound to have. (By the way, I haven’t yet read the Diane Johnson review, expecting to quarrel with it since I don’t like some of the things she has written.183 But now I will, having said my own say to you. Carmen gently feared that the review contained misunderstandings of the text.)

  Nothing else is new here. We are starting to do our income tax, due June 15. Jim is issuing invitations for my birthday June 21, which may be celebrated in Montmartre on a terrace belonging to Jon Randal of the Washington Post. I don’t at all appreciate becoming sixty-seven—a fact which seems to have little to do with me until I look in the mirror.

  With much love and large-eyed respect,184

  * * *

  P.S. For future editions, which the book will surely have: here, second l. from bottom, “fossilized”: here, second paragraph, “diphtheria”: here, second paragraph “sulleness.”

  * * *

  P.P.S. I’ve finished the Diane Johnson piece and find no fault in it.

  “WRITING A NOVEL” BY ELIZABETH HARDWICK

  “CAL WORKING, ETC.” BY ELIZABETH HARDWICK

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  “WRITING A NOVEL”

  BY ELIZABETH HARDWICK

  It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work and lead this life, the one I am leading today. Each morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread, the table with the Phone, the books and magazines, the Times at the door. It does not help to remember Rand Avenue in Lexington and old summer rockers still on the gray, dry planks of winter porches. A novel is always written on the day of its writing.

  I begin, seeking distance, imagining or pretending to imagine thus:

  “She often spent the entire day in blue, limpid boredom. The caressing sting of it was, for her, like the pleasure of lemon, or of cold salt water. This lovely boredom one saw in her eyes, in those pleasant, empty, withdrawn and peering eyes—orbs in a porcelain head. At such times she looked her best, very quiet, her face harmoniously fixed, as if for an important camera. Her skinny brown cat stared at her, hardly blinking. His yellowish-gray gaze was very like her own. They looked at each other, unseeing, into a mirror of eyes, before the cat fell asleep, his lids suddenly closing, tightly, quickly, strangely. ‘That cat has been here with me for seven years and has never looked at television. They are indeed a different species,’ she thought.

  “Then she took a cigarette from the pocket of the smock she was wearing. She drew on it, as if it were opium; adding to the opium that was within her, the narcotic of her boredom, as we are told we carry our own heaven and hell within us. Immaculate drugs, hazy drifts of dreams, passivity pure and rich as cream.

  “After a dreamy day, she went into her nights. Always she insisted they were full of agitation, restlessness, torment. She was forever like one watched over the whole night in the deepest sleep, who nevertheless awakened worn, with a tremor in her hands, declaring the pains, the unutterable, absorbing drama of sleeplessness. The tossing, the racing, the battles; the captures and escapes hidden behind her oily eyelids. No one was more skillful than she in the confessions of an insomniac, in those redundant yet stirring epics, which she intoned with the dignity of ritual, her hypnotic narration like that of some folk poet ‘steeped in the oral tradition.’ ‘Finally, sleep came over me.… At last.… It was drawing near to four o’clock. The first color was in the sky.… Only to wake up suddenly, completely.’

  “Unsavory egotism? No—mere hope of self-definition, the heroism of description, the martyrdom of documentation. The chart of life must be brought up to date every morning. ‘Patient slept fitfully, complained of the stitches. Alarming persistence of the very symptoms for which the operation was performed. Perhaps it is only the classical aching of the stump.’”

  * * *

  An impasse. How can she, opiumstill, a dramatic star of ennui, with catlike eyes and abrupt disappearances, begin, continue? Her end is clearly too soon at hand. On the next page, verisimilitude would not be outraged to find her dead. Not smiling perhaps, as they say suicides smile, but reflective, sunk in last thoughts. Her still gaze would be downward, as if she, who knew nothing of literature, were thinking of poetry or philosophy.

  Lasst uns lauten, knien, beten,

  Und dem alten Gott vertaun!

  Soon I abandon the languid girl. My mind is elsewhere. I have taken a journey in order to write my novel in peace. A steamy haze blurs the lines of the hills. A dirty, exhausting sky. Already the summer seems to be passing away. The boats will soon be gathered in, ferries roped to the dock.

  A new scene: A short pear-shaped man came onto the stage for his lecture. He is the author of two peculiar novels, some shorter fiction of an in-between length difficult to publish, and a number of literary essays. All of his work is strikingly interesting and odd. His essays are gracefully and yet fiercely written, with the same teasing moil of metaphor found in his fiction; but of course their meaning is clearer and people are inclined to prefer them to his pure works of the imagination. His opinion is different: he feels his essays are works of the imagination but that somehow in the end they do not fully reward their hurting effort. They live and die in a day, a week at most. The orange, black, and yellow wings of opinion make a pleasant, whirring sound, dip down, soar up ward, and then disappear, their organic destiny achieved.

  His mere name on the page can make you tremble if you are interested in him. Movement, agitation, somber explosion of thought and feeling—complicated learning and an aggressive, poetic style. He has no remarkable popular reputation. Only the most curious and the most alert care about him, but they care with some vehemence. He is enormously ambitious, resolute, assured, and seems not to know that he is rumpled, lumpy, looks far older than his forty-one years. His clothes are a scandal.

  A pert-faced, slim wife, with very short hair, came into the hall with him. She sits down on the aisle in a row near the front, but not in the very first rows. The wife smiles a good deal and appears to be proud, but with moderation. Her smile disguises the frowning dilemma that never leaves her thoughts: the mathematical estimate of his talents, which are not precise in her mind, to be weighed against the score of his defects—acerbity, impatience—which are.

  * * *

  The author begins to speak of his obsession: the theoretical problems of contemporary fiction. In his life he is a man of reason, bound in his spontaneous actions and in his deliberated decisions to a loose, but genuine, reverence for cause and effect. There are times when he grows short-tempered because of the ignorance or bad character of many people. Then he angrily asserts the laws of cause and effect, and he accuses with a good deal of arrogance.

  Fiction is another matter. He cannot, for us, for himself, accept a simple, linear motivation as a proper way to write novels, involve characters. He does not at all agree that if the gun is hanging on the wall in the first act it must go off before the curtain comes down. No, the ground has slipped away from causality. Muddy, gorgeously polluted tides of chaos, mutat
ion, improvisation have rushed in to make a strewn, random beach out of what had not so long ago been a serene shore, bordering a house lot always suitable for building.

  He accepts, embraces, adores the fragments of life. But he studies them with great sternness, with a clean, sharp rigidity, and in this way he puts together fictions that are new, difficult, obscure, and “really good.”

  As they are going home after the lecture, his wife says to him, “Is it actually OK to write stories about writing?” She has overheard this whispered remark during the question period. Fiction about fiction—Borges, etc. The skepticism thrills her, even as it brings on a little squeezing of her heart. He must not fail, and yet she feels perversity in him, nagging withholdings, a stingy reluctance to redeem his narrative promises. For instance, he has written a story about her mother, a woman he despises. Somehow it angers the wife that her own mother, the creator of brutal emotions in the heart of the author, the vigilant, dirty-fingered, blue-haired mother has come out like a beaded purse, pure design.

  “Now, all writing is about writing, especially poetry,” he answers thoughtfully, without rancor. After all it is the question. His wife, he knew, read a great deal, but never willingly. She reads as you keep the store for the good of the family: his work, those he has praised and learned from, those he disapproves of seriously.

  One evening they went to hear a large, handsome English poet, first-rate for a long time, his career arching from the Georgian to the very moment of his appearance. In his scattered, fascinating remarks about his own work, the poet spoke in a hospitable manner of Frost and Ransom. Later, at the reception, a student tried to approach the poet. “I didn’t know you particularly admired Frost. Wouldn’t have thought it somehow,” the young man said. “I don’t,” the poet said. “Not in the least. And Ransom only with reservation. Still if you name one, you must name two. One lone name out of a national tradition, even a dreadfully short, patchy one, is no go. Arouses suspicion, doesn’t sound genuine.” The author’s wife liked that. She has a feeling for paradox and for unfriendly appraisals.