The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  * * *

  The odd thing is that I have taken the two, husband and wife, from life, but they have come out false to their real meaning. The writer is not a fraud but a genius, a rare creature out of nowhere—actually from Shaker Heights around Cleveland, like Hart Crane. His seriousness, excellence, eccentricity stir my feelings. His wife is agreeable, sociable, but her “reality” and her lack of ostentation, her simplicity, her way of puncturing pretension are not the sly and cunning moral virtues I have made them appear. Those ideas of hers have nothing to do with literature, with the novel. Her husband rightly goes his own way.

  But how is the man’s genius to be made manifest—at breakfast, making love, engaging in his ruling passion which is writing? How is his art to become real in my novel? What is a writer’s motif, his theme song, except stooped shoulders, the appalling desolation of trouser and jacket and old feet stuffed into stretched socks. And women writers, of course, interest me more since I am a woman. Remember what Sainte-Beuve said about George Sand: “A great heart, a large talent, and an enormous bottom.”

  An unhappy summer, and yet not a happy subject for literature. Very hard to put the vulgar and common sufferings on paper. I use “vulgar and common,” in the sense of belonging to many, frequently, everlastingly occurring. The misery of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the telling, in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Pleasant to be pierced by the daggers at the end of paragraphs.

  * * *

  The phlox blooms in its faded purples; on the hillside, phallic pines. Foreigners under the arcades, in the basket shops. When you travel your great discovery is that you do not exist. I have for a long time had the idea of a sort of short-wave autobiography, one that fades in and out, local voices mixing with the mysterious static of the cadences of strangers. Truth should be heightened and falsity adorned, dressed up to look like sociable fact. Nevertheless, a memoir, a confession, is not as easy as it seems. It is not necessary for an autobiography to “have had a life”—that we accept now. Pasternak’s line: To live a life is not to cross a field. The “not” perplexes me. Life is to be seen as climbing a mountain? That we can agree to because of the awful strain of the climb and at the top many of the same wild flowers as in the field below.

  The murderous German girl with her alpenstock, her hiking boots, calls to the old architect, Higher, higher! He falls to his death and this is Ibsen’s disgust with the giddiness of men. For himself, he adjusted his rimless spectacles and turned the corners of his mouth down when fervent young girls thought he was dumber than he was. The troubles in a memoir are both large and small. Those still living do not create the longest hesitations. I am sure no one makes an enemy without wishing to do so. The need is sometimes very pressing; the relief rather disappointing. No, the troubles are not with relatives, lovers, famous persons seen at a deforming angle. The troubles are all with yourself seen at an angle, yourself defamed and libeled.

  * * *

  Memoirs: felonious pages in which one accuses others of real faults and oneself only of charming infidelities, unusual follies, improvidence but no meanness, a restlessness as beguiling as the winds of Aeolus, excesses, vanities, and sensualities that are the envy of all. I have thought of calling my memoir Living and Partly Living. But I am not happy with “partly living.” It comes down too hard on the aridity of modern life, on the dispirited common folk without tradition, on the dead gods and the banished God. It would not seem to fit the spirit and mood of the moment, a mood I partake of as a pigeon partakes of the crumbs that fall from fingers he cannot see.

  Is it possible for a woman to write a memoir? Their productions often fail to be interesting because there isn’t enough sex in them, not even enough longing for consummation. Can we seriously speak of the young lieutenant with his smooth hair, the hint of coquetry in the cruel charm of his glance? Women do not like to tell of bastards begotten, of pawings in the back seat, of a lifetime with its mound of men climbing on and off. That will not make a heroine of you, or even a personage. The question with us, in love, is to discover whether we have experienced conquest or surrender—or neither. Courage under ill-treatment is a woman’s theme, life-theme, and is of some interest, but not if there is too much of either.

  Maybe the shadows will suffice—the light and the shade. Think of yourself as if you were in Apollinaire’s poem:

  Here you are in Marseilles, surrounded by watermelons,

  Here you are in Coblenz at the Hotel du Géant.

  Here you are in Rome sitting under a Japanese medlar tree.

  Here you are in Amsterdam.…

  1954

  Dearest M: Here I am in Boston, on Marlborough Street, number 239. I am looking out on a snow storm. It fell like a great armistice, bringing all struggles to an end. People are walking about in wonderful costumes—old coats with fur collars, woolen caps, scarves, boots, leather hiking shoes that shine like copper. Under the yellow glow of the street lights you begin to imagine what it was like forty or fifty years ago. The stillness, the open whiteness—nostalgia and romance in the clear, quiet, white air.…

  More or less settled in this handsome house. Flowered curtains made to measure, rugs cut for the stairs, bookshelves, wood for the fireplace. Climbing up and down the five floors gives you a sense of ownership—perhaps. It may be yours, but the house, the furniture, strain toward the universal and it will read soon like a stage direction: Setting—Bostonian. The law will be obeyed. Chests, tables, dishes, domestic habits fall into line.

  Beautiful mantles of decorated marble—neo-Greek designs of fading blacks and palest greens. “Worth the price of the whole house”—the seller’s flourish of opinion and true for once. But it is the whole house that occupies my thoughts. On the second floor, two parlors. Grand, yes, but 239 is certainly not without its pockets of deprivation, its corners of tackiness. Still it is a setting.

  Here I am with my hibiscus blooming in the bay window. The other parlor looks out on the alley between Marlborough and Beacon. There an idiot man keeps a dog on a chain, day and night. Bachelor garbage, decay, bewilderment pile up around the man. I have the idea he once had a family, but they have gone away. I imagine that if his children were to visit he would say, “Come to see the dog on a chain. It is a present.” In the interest of the dog I call the police. The man glances up at my window in perturbation, wondering what he has done wrong. Darwin wrote some place that the suffering of the lower animals throughout time was more than he could bear to think of.

  Dearest love,

  Elizabeth

  * * *

  Was that written for the archives? Who is speaking? Description and landscape are like layers of underclothes. Words and rhythms, a waterfall of clauses, blue and silver lights, amber eyes, the sea below like a burning lake. It has all fallen into obsolescence. The great power of words, the old tyrant, questioned; painted scenery is like taking a long train journey to an emergency. Who can remember the shape of a single face in fiction? The perfection of the pointed chin; eyes and ears as alert as those of a small, nervous dog. Sweeps of luxurious black hair, wavy brilliance—abundant, prickly forest of thick, amorous Levantine hair. Who can bring to mind the shape of the lithe-boned heroines, with fair glances, haughty eyes colored like semiprecious stones? Only one facial feature remains in memory: the sparse mustache on the lip of Princess Bolkónskaya in the early pages of War and Peace.

  1962

  Dearest M: Here I am in New York, on 67th Street in a high, steep place with long, dirty windows. In the late afternoon, in the gloom of the winter lights, I sometimes imagine it is Edinburgh in the Nineties. I have never been to Edinburgh, but I like cities of reasonable size, provincial capitals. Still it is definitely New York here, underfoot and overhead. The passage was not easy. Not unlike a great crossing of the ocean, or of the country itself, with all your things in wagons, over the mountains. I can say that the trestle table and the highboy were ill-prepared for the sudden exile, the change of government—as in
a way this was for me. Well, fumed oak stands in the corner, bottles and ice bucket on top. Five of the Naval Academy plates are broken. The clocks have had their terminal stroke and will never again know life. The old bureaus stand fixed, humiliated, chipped.

  Displaced things and old people, rigid, dragged with their tired veins and clogged arteries, with their bunions and broken arches, their sparse hair and wavering memories, over the Carpathian Mountains, out of the bayous—that is what it is here in the holy city. Aunt Lotte’s portrait will never be unpacked again. She finds her resting place, in the tomb of her crate, in the basement, her requiem the humming of the Seventh Avenue subway. I play Wozzeck on my new KLH. Terrific reception in these old West Side rooms—at least for phonograph records.

  Love, love,

  Elizabeth

  * * *

  “Beginnings are always delightful; the threshold is the place to pause,” Goethe said. But it is not true that it doesn’t matter where you live, that you are, in Hartford or Dallas, merely the same. Everything has come to me and been taken from me because of moving from place to place. Youth and hope were left in Boston, but New York turned out to be the last thing I would have expected—sensible. Long dresses, arrogance, more chances for women to deceive the deceitful, confidences, long telephone conversations, credit cards. But, dear M, which part of the true story should I tell? Should I choose the events interesting today, or try, facing the shame of lost opinion, to remain true to what I felt and thought at the time? The girl with her brown hair cut in a Dutch bob?

  1972

  Dearest M: I have sold the big house in Maine and will make a new place there, beginning with the old barn on the water. “Existing barn,” the architect’s drawings say. But I fear the metamorphosis, the journey of species. The barn, or so I imagine of all barns, once existed for cows and hay. Then later it was—well, a place. (For what I do not like to say. Too much information spoils the effect on the page, like too many capitals within the line, or the odious exclamation point. Anyway, you have the information.)

  Will the barn consent to become what I have decided to make of it? I don’t know. Sometimes I am sure that I am building for a tire salesman from Bangor whose wife will not be kind to the sacred wounds of such a building—the claims, the cries of the original barn, the memories of the abandoned place. The claims and cries of Lightolier, Design Research, turkey carpets. As for the other, sluffed-off house, I mourn and regret much. The nights long ago with H. W. and her glorious 78 recording of Alice Raveau in Glück’s Orpheo. I hear the music, see H. W. very tall, old, with her stirring maidenly beauty. The smell of the leaves outside dripping rain, the fire alive, the bowls of nasturtiums everywhere, the orange Moroccan cloth hanging over the mantle. What a loss. Perhaps my memories, being kind, betray me and bleach the darkness of the scenes, the agitation of the evenings. I am as aware as anyone of the appeal, the drama of the negative. Well, we go from one graven image to the next and, say what you will, each house is a shrine.

  Meanwhile here in New York I just saw a horse and rider amidst the threatening taxi cabs. The man rides the horse indeed as if he were driving a cab, nervously, angrily, looking straight ahead, in his own lane, one way, held on the conveyor belt of traffic, needing only a horse horn of some kind to show that a man may in New York turn a horse into a Dodge.

  When I first came here the house opposite was a stables. A handsome brick building painted a dusty mustard color, like an Italian villa. Sometimes the old structure seems to return, coming out of the afternoon haze, rising from the sea of cement. But what good would the return do itself, me? I will not look back. The horse and rider escaped to the park. Where the old stables stood there is a parking lot. A hundred beautiful chariots rest there in the afternoon sun. And at night sometimes the car of someone I know sits there all alone, waiting, long, long after midnight.

  Much love, as always,

  Elizabeth

  * * *

  Oh, M, when I think of the people I have buried. And what of the “dreadful cries of murdered men in forests.” Tell me, dear M, why is it that we cannot keep the note of irony, the tinkle of carelessness at a distance? Sentences in which I have tried for a certain light tone—many of those have to do with events, upheavals, destructions that caused me to weep like a child. Some removals I have never gotten over and I am, like everyone else, an amputee. (Why do I put in “like everyone else”? I fear that if I say I am an amputee, and more so than anyone else, I will be embarrassing, over-reaching. Yet in my heart I do believe I am more damaged than most.)

  O you could not know

  That such swift fleeing

  No soul foreseeing—

  Not even I—would undo me so!

  I hate the glossary, the concordance of truth that some have about my real life—have like an extra pair of spectacles. I mean that such fact is to me a hindrance to composition. Otherwise I love to be known by those I care for and consequently I am always on the phone, always writing letters, always waking up to address myself to B. and D. and E.—those whom I dare not ring up until the morning and yet must talk to throughout the night.

  Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

  * * *

  (This is the opening of a novel in progress to be called The Cost of Living.)

  “CAL WORKING, ETC.” 1

  BY ELIZABETH HARDWICK

  Cal’s recuperative powers were almost as much of a jolt as his breakdowns; this is, knowing him in the chains of illness you could, for a time, not imagine him otherwise. And when he was well, it seemed so miraculous that the old gifts of person and art were still there, as if they had been stored in some serene, safe box somewhere. Then it did not seem possible that the dread assault could return to hammer him into bits once more.

  He “came to,” sad, worried, always ashamed and fearful; and yet there he was, this unique soul for whom one felt great pity. His fate was like a strange, almost mythical two-engined machine, one running to doom and the other to salvation. Out of the hospital he returned to his days, which were regular, getting up early in the morning, going to his room or separate place for work. All day long he lay on the bed, propped up on an elbow. And this was his life, reading, studying and writing. The papers piled up on the floor, the books on the bed, the bottles of milk on the window sill, and the ashtray filled.

  He looked like one of the great photographs of Whitman, taken by Thomas Eakins—Whitman in carpet slippers, a shawl, surrounded by a surf of papers almost up to his lap. Almost every day Cal worked the entire day and if we were alone he would go back after supper. Since he was in no sense an auto-didact, and not the sort of poet, if there are any, for whom beautiful things come drifting down in a snowfall of gift, the labor was merciless. The discipline, the dedication, the endless revision, the constant adding to his store by reading and studying—all of this had, in my view, much that was heroic about it.

  Fortunately, Cal was “well” much more of his life than he was not; otherwise his large and difficult, for him, production would not exist.

  The breakdowns had the aspect of a “brain fever,” such as you read about in 19th century fiction. His brain was literally hot, whirling, but even at these times it was his brain that was fevered, askew and shaken out of shape. When I visited him in the hospital it was quite clear that few of the other afflicted were capable of this temperature, made or otherwise. We were always ordered rather grandly to bring the Vergil, the Dante, the Homer, the Elisabeth Schwarzkopf record. Of course he was not really “cool” enough to read or to listen, that being the problem. But he could make the patients listen to his scattered readings aloud. For the most part I got the impression that they didn’t mind and looked on it in a sort of bemused daze, while of course mumbling the refrains of their own performance …

  Then at last the books were brought back home, the socks, with their name-tapes as if for a summer camp, were gathered up. And there it was, with only th
e sadness, actually the unfairness of the fate, remaining.

  Cal was very sociable, curious, fond of a large number of people—otherwise there would not be so much “testimony” about him. After literature, his passion was history, of which he knew a great deal. He liked music and liked to listen to it, but I never felt he could take it in the way he took in painting, for which his love was detailed, thoughtful and very strong. In Europe I often fell by the wayside, into the coffee bar, but he went on to each thing, each church, never seeming to have enough, to be tired.

  Everything about him was out-sized: his learning, his patience with his work, his dedication, and the pattern of his troubled life. I think it is true, as he said, that he knew a lot of happiness in each of his decades, happiness that is when he was fortunately for such long creative and private periods “himself.”

  * * *

  Ian: I put in the rather dull paragraph about painting and being sociable just in case at some point that could be helpful in moving from one thing to another. For the rest, I don’t think of it as being all of a piece, but to be used perhaps broken up here and there to give some idea of what returning over and over to writing was like. I feel strongly about all of these points, especially about the amount of time well and the amount otherwise.